I’ve long argued that tough constraints often make for a better service and few services are more constrained than Wikipedia where the only source of revenue is user donations. I came across this talk by Domas Mituzas of Wikipedia while reading old posts on Data Center Knowledge.   The posting A Look Inside Wikipedia’s Infrastructure includes a summary of the talk Domas gave at Velocity last summer.  

Interesting points from the Data Center Knowledge posting and the longer document referenced below from the 2007 MySQL coference:

·  Wikipedia serves the world from roughly 300 servers

o  200 application servers

o  70 Squid servers

o  30 Memcached servers (2GB each)

o  20 MySQL servers using Innodb, each with 16GB of memory (200 to 300GB each)

o  They also use Squid, Nagios, dsh, nfs, Ganglia, Linux Virtual Service, Lucene over .net on Mono, PowerDNS, lighttpd, Apache, PHP, MediaWiki (originated at Wikipedia)

·  50,000 http requests per second

·  80,000 MySQL requests per second

·  7 million registered users

·  18 million objects in the English version

For the 2007 MySQL Users Conference, Domas posted great details on the Wikipidia architecture: Wikipedia: Site internals, configuration, code examples and management issues (30 pages).  I’ve posted other big service scaling and architecture talks at: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/27/MySpaceArchitectureAndNet.aspx.

James Hamilton
Amazon Web Services
jrh@mvdirona.com

Updated: Corrected formatting issue.