Case Study: Wikipedia achieves massive, cost-effective scalability with MySQL

Wikipedia - Customer Case Study

Wikipedia is a multilingual, volunteer‑built, web‑based encyclopedia that ranks among the world’s Top Ten sites, hosting over 15 million articles in 260+ languages and serving tens of millions of visitors daily. That explosive growth in visitors, content and contributors created constant pressure on its infrastructure and required a scalable, cost‑effective way to support ongoing expansion.

To meet demand, Wikipedia scaled out its LAMP stack using MySQL replication—growing from a single server to more than 20 replicated database servers, with lightweight MySQL instances on application servers as a distributed archive. This architecture keeps content current for users, accommodates continued user and content growth, and reduces hardware costs by allowing incremental server additions as needed.

Wikipedia