5 ms·
Wikimedia is certainly bloated. They're spending upwards of $100 million a year.
by colinmhayes 4y ago
Wikimedia is certainly bloated. They're spending upwards of $100 million a year.
- mhh__ 4y agoHow much is the correct amount for a site that serves such a huge amount of the internet?
- colinmhayes 4y agoDepends on their services? Wikipedia serves static sites. Their hosting costs are 3 million a year according to their accountants. They have no real recommendation engine, or really dynamic content at all. 100% of their content is free for them. They can easily store their entire site in ram on a small cluster. Given that I'd say 10-30 million would be reasonable.
- bawolff 4y agoDid you know that wikipedia's tagline is "anyone can edit"? That makes it not static.
- colinmhayes 4y agoI don't really agree with your definition of static. Wikipedia has no request time processing on their pages. If you request the english version of the hacker news article it'll just grab the HTML from ram and send it over. Of course there's an api for posting edits, but that's as simple as updating a few rows in a database, and only happens once, when the edit it posted.
- bawolff 4y agoIn the ideal case yes - and a significant portion of requests fall into that case (varnish cache), but its also the cheapest case by far. Wikipedia gets edited a lot, and a single edit can often affect many pages (in extreme cases, millions of pages). Keeping up with content churn is where a lot of the computational resources are directed. Now sure, this is still a lot easier than if every page view had to be rendered on demand dynamically. However a truly static site where things don't change at all is trivial compared to wikipedia to host.
- dougb5 4y agoGoogle spent nearly 2000 times that, and a great deal of its own value to the world is from indexing Wikipedia.