Wikitech-l October 2003

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

79 participants
171 discussions

Need developers
by Tim Starling 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

Is there anyone out there who has considered contributing to the MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for reasons such as: * Don't know PHP/MySQL * Poor documentation, can't understand the code * Wouldn't know where to start * Don't have a test server * Don't have CVS/server access, and you find contributing otherwise to be tedious and frustrating Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from contributing again for reasons such as those above? If so, please speak up! What areas could we improve to make it easier to contribute? If you prefer, you can contact me privately at tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau. -- Tim Starling.

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Load balancing
by Jimmy Wales 02 Nov '03

02 Nov '03

What are our plans for the network architecture as soon as the new server arrives (sometime next week)? At that time, we hope that larousse and pliny will both be successfully upgraded (though I believe that Jason has not yet successfully gotten 4 gig of RAM to work, but 2 gig each and dual Athlon 2800+ should be do-able) and equivalent to each other. The DB server will be the DB server, that much we know for sure. :-) Beyond that, I think that the easiest thing to do would be to have en served by one machine, and everything else by the other machine. Based on total article count, which is roughly comparable for en vs rest-of-the-world, that seems good, but is it really? What about traffic? In the longer term, the right way to do this is not to load balance by domain names, but to load balance properly. I have had very good success in the past using iptables and a configuration that looks a lot like this picture: http://www.ultramonkey.org/2.0.1/topologies/lb-eg.html Of course, I did this years ago, and the "poor man's" way -- I think there are probably packages (like ultramonkey!) that are quick solutions now. The beauty of this kind of architecture is: 1. high availability -- if one webserving node falls over, traffic automatically goes to the ones that are still up 2. easy expandability -- just add more webservers, at $2000 a crack for 'good enough' machines, and install the software and there you go. Anyhow, to really do something like this, we'd need one more machine, but it need not be very powerful, since it's only going to be doing NAT/IPTABLES stuff. --Jimbo

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Test server idea
by Tim Starling 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

Perhaps we could set up test.wikipedia.org as an ISP-style user script directory, i.e. with open_basedir and disable_functions and all that. We could then make a simple upload form which allows people to upload scripts to it using a web interface. I'm not suggesting someone else do this, I'm suggesting someone try to talk me out of it, if there's any reason it won't work. -- Tim Starling.

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RE: [Wikitech-l] Need developers
by Poor, Edmund W 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

Tim, After enthusiastically accepting Jimbo's offer to provide me with "developer access", I quickly soured on having any hands-on participation. It was as I feared: no requirements documents, nothing about architecture or detailed design. The hardest-working, most universally respected developer(s) kept basically saying "just read the code". So I've kept on the sidelines. I've been a cheerleader and catalyst (for speed tweaks) and for many months a sort of chief sysop (carrying out bans and promotions). As for your request for suggestions, I think the best thing would be to adopt some sort of "best practices" methodology. I don't care if it's XP, CMM, or just a checklist of common- sence guidelines from Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development". Adopt some mutually agreeable (and useful!) guiding principles, and follow them: that's what I suggest. Ed Poor Highly Paid Professional Software Engineer

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Test server idea
by Daniel Mayer 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

Tim wrote: >Perhaps we could set up test.wikipedia.org .... Wikipedia is not the only project that runs MediaWiki. Please use test.wikimedia.org instead. Part of the problem with attracting users and developers of MediaWiki has been the very strong perception that MediaWiki is for encyclopedias only. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Test server idea
by Daniel Mayer 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

I wrote: >Wikipedia is not the only project that runs MediaWiki. >Please use test.wikimedia.org instead. Part of the problem >with attracting users and developers of MediaWiki has >been the very strong perception that MediaWiki is for >encyclopedias only. I should have wrote "for Wikipedia only." --mav

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Server purchase plan - advice needed quickly
by Jimmy Wales 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

With the sudden reaching of our $6,000 goal, we have money to go shopping, and I want to do it right away. Jason will be in San Diego on Monday to finish the first round of upgrades, and I'd love it if he had to drive back down there on Friday to install the new big db machine. We actually have $7,000 in Paypal which I can transfer to our regular bank account, where we already have almost $2,500 of my money that I put in to kick things off. So that's an actual available funds of $9,500, although of course we should NOT spend it all on the database machine unless that's the best thing to do. Here's what I have lined up at penguincomputing.com for $7,108.00. Please comment. One thing totally left open here is how to partition the RAID volume, probably Brion and others can give good advice about the best way to do that. One of the toughest decisions is which exact RAM to buy. 1GB pieces are a lot cheaper, and there are 8 total slots available. So I thought: buy 4 1GB pieces, and there's plenty of room for growth. When 2GB pieces drop in price (which I'm sure they will, and quickly), we have room for 8 gig more or 12 total. Or, if absolutely needed, we could move these 1GB pieces to other machines in our future network, and fill this server up to the full 16gig. It would cost $778 more to have 2x2Gig = 4 versus what I have, which is 1x4Gig = 4. For the RAID, I selected 4x36gig in a RAID 5 array, for a logical drive capacity of 105 gig. I also selected 1 extra hot spare drive, just for that much more added reliability. There are many other possibilities for this, and I'm open to recommendations. My impression is that with RAID 5, more drives means more performance, but with enough RAM, we shouldn't be hitting the drives that hard anyway. Component Summary Standard Features 3U (5.25") Rackmount Chassis Dual AMD Opteron 200 Series Processors Up to 16GB of PC2100 ECC Reg. DDR RAM Integrated Dual Channel ATA-100 Controller Up to Seven Hot-swappable 3.5" Hard Drive Bays Dual Integrated Gigabit NICs Three Available PCI Slots Integrated Video SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64 Preload Altus 3200 Documentation Penguin Computing Three Year Warranty Selected Features Altus 3200 Hot Swap Power Supply Dual AMD Opteron 246 Processors 4GB Low Profile PC2700 ECC DDR (4 x 1GB) Up to 6 Drives on 2 SCSI Channels in two 3-bay SCA Internal Enclosures LSI 320-2: 2 Channel RAID 64MB w/battery backup 105.0 GB RAID 5 Volume (4+1) 36GB, 10,000RPM Low Profile SCA 52X IDE CD-ROM Rackmount Ball-Bearing Rails (Rack Depth 26") Preload ONLY, SuSE Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64 Standard Three Year Warranty Resource Summary PROCESSOR MAIN MEMORY Total installed memory -> 4096 MB Free memory slots -> 1 SIMM Free memory slots -> 4 DIMM NETWORK INTERFACE 1GB/sec Copper -> 2 RJ-45 DISK INTERFACE Total SCA Drive Bays (Low Profile) -> 6 bays Free SCA Drive Bays (Low Profile) -> 1 bays Total 5.25" Drive Bays -> 6 bays IDE Interface -> 4 RAID Channels -> 2 PCI / ISA Slots PCI slots -> 7 total PCI slots PCI slots -> 6 free PCI slots Video Disk Storage Summary Mount Point Partition Size File System RAID 5 Volume (4+1) x 36GB, 10,000RPM Low Profile SCA Logical Capacity: 105 GB unallocated 105.0 GB (100.0) Unassigned Partitions / ext3 6.00 GB /boot ext3 80 MB /home ext3 0 MB /var ext3 1.02 GB swap swap 2.04 GB TOTALS Logical Capacity: 105.0 GB, Allocated Capacity: 0.0 GB (0.0 %) Unallocated Capacity 105.0 GB (100.0)

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PHP parser made twice as fast
by Tim Starling 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

I just doubled the speed of the PHP parser. In my test page ([[Anime]], ~60 links with half broken), I cut the time for replaceInternalLinks from 800ms to 350ms, and the time for Article::view from 1310 to 610ms. This was acheived by eliminating redundant calls to secureAndSplit, using static variables for constants, and catering to PHP oddities such as the fact that === is slower than ==. Okay, you may shower me with praise now. -- Tim Starling.

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AW: [Wikitech-l] Maybe we should try to reach a consensus
by Dufrenoy, Alexis 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

In fact the question is no more the choice between Debian, RedHat and SuSE, but only between RedHat and SuSE, since Debian does not really fit on Athlon 64 for the moment. So this software, which could be an interesting feature for Wikipedia could make a difference, isn't it ? Traroth -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Well, Taw, I appreciate that you remember my request. Some people at Japanese wikipedia indicated that being able to use Japanese in TeX would be good. I personally do not know much about how good, or how crucial, it is. But I have seen japanese wikipedians mentioning to it multiple times, and one time I specifically asked if I should make a request to others (outside japanese wikipedia). Some wikipedians responded that that would be nice. So I believe it is at least somewhat meaningful thing for math and other TeX-intensive articles. Regards, Tomos

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AW: AW: [Wikitech-l] Maybe we should try to reach a consensus
by Dufrenoy, Alexis 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

Oh. Yes, that's right. Traroth >Also note that this machine will be running the database only, not the >web servers, so the TeX packages don't make any difference here. >-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Wikitech-l October 2003