Intriguing bit of news today yesterday from Novell’s Miguel de Icaza, who informs us that Wikipedia (the user written encyclopedia, for the uninitiated – it’s a phenomenal resource) has transitioned from GCJ/Lucene to Mono / dotLucene.
Things I find interesting about the announcement:
- The fact that Wikipedia would consider Mono
- The fact that, after considering Mono, they migrated from Java
- The fact that Mono will scale to Wikipedia type loads (which while not Google like, are considerable)
- The fact that Mono 1.1.7 performs that much better than 1.1.6, which in my personal use has been considerably more performant than the 1.0 branch
The fact that Wikipedia’s using Lucene or the dotLucene port is not, however, much of a surprise. Having used Lucene locally as part of my Beagle instantiation, I can testify to the fact that if the indexing is this fast on an 866 with 256 MB’s of RAM, it’s probably just a bit faster on Wikipedia’s hardware.
So without making too much of a case study of this – as Wikipedia’s technical selection process has little bearing on that of enterprises – this is an interesting datapoint.
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