hatnote
compare wikichanges?
I posted this question to StackOverflow asking how wikimon compares with https://github.com/edsu/wikichanges/
stackoverflow didn't like that question, so I'll repaste it here:
wikichanges and wikimon provide similar functionality, i.e. listen to the IRC channels of Recentchanges in Wikipedia, and re-transmit the updates over websockets to browser apps. Both are used to enable delightful visualizations: wikimon powers listen-to-wikipedia and wikichanges powers wikistream
Other than that wikichanges uses node.js and wikimon uses python and autobhan, is there a difference between them when running under load?
What are people's experiences running the two under load? Which is more stable for large numbers of clients?
What hardware setups are needed to support thousands of simultaneous clients--- is that even practical to consider?
So, it's been a long time since I've run wikichanges, and I was never an expert, but I can answer the wikimon side of the load question. At peak, I've seen wikimon handle thousands of connections at once with just a single process on a 1GB VM (with plenty of other stuff happening in the background). We do run it under supervisord and restart it on an interval to keep things nice and stable, but the setup isn't anything fancy, you can find almost all of it right here on Github.
As far as features, wikimon also supports geolocation of anonymous edits against a locally running copy of FreeGeoIP, which in turn requires Go and a running copy of memcached. That's best effort, though, and wikimon will run fine without it.
Wikimon is also somewhat built as a service. Provided that you're trying to visualize/collect data on one of the many Wikipedias supported, we encourage you to connect directly to our server. Even taking into account Wikipedia's own IRC publishing outages (which are few and far between), the uptime is right around 99%.
