Jimmy-
But, imagine this: suppose I were shopping at
http://www.penguincomputing.com/, as I always do, and I wanted to
spend around $3000 on new hardware for wikipedia.
Thank you for continuing to support Wiki[mp]edia with substantial amounts
of your own money. I agree with Brion's proposal -- our current main
problems are the slowness of Larousse and the unreliability of Pliny (the
cause of the latter, however, remains unknown).
Beyond investments in hardware, I hope we will also consider hiring a
crack MySQL hacker if/when we can afford it, to whack our database
structure, DB server setup and SQL queries into shape. There's still room
for optimization, and it would be nice to get some of the Special Pages
back. On the PHP front, stuff like a new parser (much needed) or memcached
integration (huge potential benefits) would come to fruition faster if we
could compensate MediaWiki developers at least to a certain extent. This
should be part of the Wikimedia planning.
Regards,
Erik