Wikipedia standardizes servers on Ubuntu

[LinuxMint-4]

Wikipedia standardizes servers on Ubuntu

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS6069835429.html

The operator of the popular Wikipedia website has reportedly standardized its 400 servers on Ubuntu. San Francisco based Wikimedia Foundation, which employs five geographically distributed IT staff, and serves two million pages daily, says the move will simplify server maintenance, according to a report.

ComputerWorld's Todd R. Weiss reports that Wikimedia began the transformation in 2006, starting with caching proxy servers. Prior to that, the infrastructure expanded "haphazardly," with a mix of Red Hat and Fedora servers, Weiss wrote.

Weiss quotes market analyst Gordon Haff as saying the choice of Ubuntu may be due to its free and commercial versions being identical. Other commercial Linux vendors, notably Red Hat, offer added functionality in their paid products, Haff is quoted as having said.

Another noteworthy feature of Ubuntu Server Edition not mentioned by Haff is support for "upgrade-in-place" scripts. These let users upgrade between releases each six months, or as infrequently as every five years (with "long-term support" or LTS releases).

[allix]

This will be very interesting to watch as they is a fairly big crowd that think ubuntu server is a living joke and that only rhel , suse or debian is capable of such high load.

[Gomer_X]

This will be very interesting to watch as they is a fairly big crowd that think ubuntu server is a living joke and that only rhel , suse or debian is capable of such high load.

I don't think Ubuntu is incapable of dealing with the load. It just doesn't make sense to use Ubuntu when Debian exists. Ubuntu doesn't have the years of experience Debian has. Same with Red Hat. If you want a reliable platform you use something with a long track record.

Linc has also talked about how Ubuntu server was a bit difficult to set up. If Wikipedia gets what they need out of Ubuntu, great. I'm sticking to Debian.

The actual software is pretty much the same anyway, so performance isn't really a factor.