Session Wikimedia, MySQL, and Free Software Jimmy Wales Track: Scaling and High Availability Date: Thursday, April 21 Time: 1:30pm - 2:15pm Location: Ballroom E TrackBack Since 2001, the Wikipedia encyclopedia project has jumped from a scratchpad side project to one of the top 300 sites on the web (Alexa stats), bringing community and media attention to both wikis and freely-licensed content. Phenomenal growth in the editing community, non-editing visitors, and the number of topics covered has put continual social and technical pressure on the scalability of the system. The wiki engine MediaWiki has grown up along with the project, following the sometimes-conflicting paths of being both easy to install and use, and performing reasonably well in a multimillion hit per day environment. Built in the scripting language PHP, MediaWiki attempts to boost performance with "alternate hard and soft layers" of code: most hits to Wikipedia are actually handled by a Squid reverse proxy cache which is faster than any PHP script could be. Pre-parsed page chunks and dynamically editable user interface data are optionally cached using Livejournal's distributed memory object cache memcached or the compatible disk-backed tugelacache. Ongoing work is being put into accelerated native-code diff, parsing, and Unicode normalization modules, while still retaining compatibility with "pure" PHP code for use in more restricted environments. This talk focusses on how free software has helped Wikipedia achieve its goals, and how MySQL in particular has played an intergral part in its success. Download presentation file

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