But you can't reach perfect efficiency. Scaling will of course reduce costs in general, but it's not a given. If I had an app that had 5 users, my costs would increase if my user number grew to 5,000,000,000.
Without knowing more information about the financials, or how resources are allocated this is all conjecture. But a website that services 17bb page views/month is going to cost a lot of money to run. They could be spending their money very poorly, idk, but I also don't know whether or not what they are spending is an appropriate amount.
We aren't talking about "perfect efficiency". We're talking about not blowing up your costs. A website that serves seventeen billion pageviews per month of mostly cacheable and edge-serviced data is, while certainly a technical challenge, a very surmountable one. And a lot of the harder parts are blunted through Wikipedia's situation. Search, for example, is a difficult problem in those situations--but I'd bet money that most of those searches are coming from Google, which mitigates a large chunk of the demands on in-house search that a different kind of website might see. (I've used Wikipedia's internal search once this year, according to my browser history.)
Point to the diseconomies of scale and we can talk about them, but everybody else has figured out how to leverage economies of scale when building out a large technical system.
> Scaling will of course reduce costs in general, but it's not a given.
Not only does it seem costs haven't been reduced, their rate of increase has exceeded the growth in pages served, quite substantially. That's not the whole story I'm sure, but as a rough estimate that doesn't seem sustainable or healthy... or necessary simply in terms of general hosting cost declines over that period.
Without knowing more information about the financials, or how resources are allocated this is all conjecture. But a website that services 17bb page views/month is going to cost a lot of money to run. They could be spending their money very poorly, idk, but I also don't know whether or not what they are spending is an appropriate amount.