As of last Friday, Wikipedia started using Mono for indexing and searching the Wikipedia, it was tested first on one server and it is now being used on all three servers.
Wikipedia’s search backend uses Mono and dotLucense, the same search backend that is used by Beagle Desktop Search. Previously, Wikipedia had been using GCJ and Lucene to do the searches but after some tuning, Mono became the new engine.
Mono 1.1.6 which was the originally tested configuration was slow, but version 1.1.7 introduced our simplified IO layer which improved IO performance significantly (2x-3x) and upcoming versions will an extra boost on IO, but most importantly the regular expression library (which MediaWiki uses) will also get a performance boost.
Mono: Debian and Ubuntu.Mono is now on Debian/Unstable.
Wikipedia indexing with Mono
Published
Aaron Fulkerson 