Today Wikimedia's world-wide five-minute-average transmission rate
crossed 10gbit/sec for the first time ever, as far as I know. This
peak rate was achieved while serving roughly 91,725 requests per
second.
This fantastic news is almost coincident with Wikipedia's 9th
anniversary on January 15th.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day ]
In casual units, a rate of 10gbit/sec is roughly equivalent to 5 of
the US Library of Congress per day (using the common 1 LoC = 20 TiB
units). Wikimedia's 24 hour average transmission rate is now over
5.4gbit/sec, or 2.6 US LoC/day.
A snapshot of the traffic graph on this historic day can be seen here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2010-01-11_wikimedia_crosses_10gbit.png
Ten years ago many traditional information sources were turning
electronic, and possibly locking out the unlimited use previously
enjoyed by public libraries. It seemed to me that closed pay-per-use
electronic databases would soon dominate all other sources of factual
information. At the same time, the public seemed to be losing much of
its interest in the more intellectually active activities such as
reading. So if someone told me then that within the decade one of the
most popular websites in the world would be a free content
encyclopedia, consisting primarily of text, or that the world would
soon be consuming over 50 terabytes of compressed educational material
per day—I never would have believed them.
The growth and success of the Wikimedia projects is an amazing
accomplishment, both for the staff and volunteers keeping the
infrastructure operating efficiently as well as the tens of thousands
of volunteers contributing this amazing corpus. This success affirms
the importance of intellectual endeavours in our daily lives and
demonstrates the awesome power of people working together towards a
common goal.
Congratulations to you all.
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