New servers to deal with performance issues
The Wikimedia Foundation placed a substantial order for new computers last week after having placed a smaller order in December. The new equipment is needed to cope with Wikipedia's constant traffic growth and recent performance struggles.
Last Friday, developer Jamesday posted information on an order of new server hardware to help run Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation websites. The order includes four computers to be used as Apache servers, plus an additional six to provide a squid cache. He also announced that all Wikimedia sites were now on a one gigabit internet connection, upgrading from the previous 100 megabit connection.
At the same time, several existing computers are not in service and in need of repairs. Although they are under warranty, nobody has been able to get them fixed yet.
In other developments, the bug in the unblocking function and the display of the block log (see archived story) was fixed last Friday with another upgrade to the MediaWiki 1.4 software.