page_title: Wikipedia
section_title: Hardware operations and support
hierarchical_section_title: Wikipedia / Operation / Hardware operations and support
caption_attribution_description: English: The life of a Wikipedia webrequest inside Wikimedia Foundation infrastructure, as of April 2020.
context_page_description: Wikipedia is a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open collaboration project by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web. It is also one of the 15 most popular websites ranked by Alexa, as of August 2020. It features exclusively free content and no commercial ads. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.
  Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, and was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined its name as a portmanteau of the terms "wiki" and "encyclopedia". Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions of Wikipedia in other languages were quickly developed. With 6.1 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 300 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 54 million articles attracting 1.5 billion unique visitors per month.
context_section_description: Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day. As of 2019, page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Varnish caching servers. Further statistics, based on a publicly available 3-month Wikipedia access trace, are available. Requests that cannot be served from the Varnish cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass them to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses.
  Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu). As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam. By January 22, 2013, Wikipedia had migrated its primary data center to an Equinix facility in Ashburn, Virginia. in 2017, Wikipedia had installed a caching cluster in an Equinix facility in Singapore, the first of its kind in Asia.
caption: Overview of system architecture as of April 2020[update]
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