As a neophyte, I found your comparisons very interesting.
I think journalists commenting on our speed might find it interesting as
well ;-) Thanks for this.
Anthere
Neil Harris a écrit:
Just to take this a bit further. I thought I'd
compare Wikipedia with
one of the "well-run sites" that we are supposed to be competing with.
Google is a good direct comparison, because of its dynamic content, with
cachable frequent queries.
Looking at the difference in traffic between Google and Wikipedia on
Alexa shows that:
* Wikipedia has 300 page views per million
* Google has 16,000 page views per million
Thus, Google serves roughly 53 times the number of page views compared
to Wikipedia.
However,
* Wikipedia currently has 39 servers
* Google has an estimated 50,000 - 100,000 servers in its worldwide farm
of clusters
Thus, Google has roughly 1250 - 2500 times as many servers as Wikipedia
[Source:
http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/How_many_Google_machines for an
estimate for April last year, and allowing for more recent expenditure]
Thus, we might regard Wikipedia as being roughly 24 to 48 times more
"efficient" in its use of hardware than Google. Given that Google has
spent over $250M on hardware, to obtain reasonable parity for our
developers to be expected to compete with Google at our current traffic
we should have around 1000 - 2000 high-performance servers, at a cost of
several million US$.
So, a reasonable answer to critics seems to be:
* the developers are already doing very well indeed coping with the
combination of extremely high demand and very limited resources
* they already know there are big growth and capacity problems, and are
working hard on scalability and reliability
* send money, rather than complaining
-- Neil