Site Speed

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Sometimes the speed of the site slows and this will need addressing in the long term. Recently an article appeared in slashdot about the starwars wiki and this generated more traffic than usual and Jason, the technical guy, was able to get three servers on line to carry the load. It remains to be seen in the future how the existing infrastructure will cope with the clicking of a lot of psychologists. However Wikia have been responsible for coping with the growth of Wikipedia up to its 5,000,000 pages in a number of languages. So they do have a track record of taking a site though fast growth and high use phases. I would be interested to know how the financial model for wikicities is structured. If click through earns advertising revenue have they factored in a proportion of that money to improve the infrastructure to support further growth. One would imagine this is only common sense and from this perspective it is in Wikicities interest to keep access speeds up to support high volume use. People wont stay or access if they are put off by a big wait. It has to be said of course that it is difficult to know how much the slowtime is due to intervening infrastructure. Clearly it seems to be quicker when America sleeps, just like the rest of the net. My own strategy has been to edit and save, with time to spare, rather than trying to do something at the last second - its better for the blood pressure that way!!! I also tend to have a large number of windows open so while one thing is saving I can be working on other pages. I got 3000 pages up in a month so it is not a major problem initially. Please use discussion page for feedback of experience on this issue. Long term scalability Because the site can be exported it will be a relatively simple matter to set up local mirrors at a local level, say on a university server. These could be updated on say a weekly basis. The key to this is that people should continue to put fresh edits onto the parent site and perhaps use the local copy for everyday reference. This arrangement would reduce the load on the main server. At the moment Wikia runs with about 56 servers chained together, managing to serve almost 1 million pages. I think it is a reasonable assumption that will generate this volume of material and their level of performance is already adequate for most purposes most of the time. Obviously in the next ten years technological improvements will improve matters further.