James D. Forrester wrote:
A quick thought - why not have two-way inter-language
links? I can't
quite see why we have only one-way links, and one (Dutch?) or more
versions of the Wikipedia, people are suggesting running a 'bot to
insert them.
Its been discussed.. the answer is unfortunately no because of many
reasons. including the factt hat there is not allways a 1:1 relation
ship between articles. I will not go into this further because its been
discussed a zillion times, check the archives if you want more info.
Also, re. using BLOBs to store images rather than a
file system: I would imagine that distributing and clustering a set of databases would be
more versatile and easier to accomplish (certainly, I've seen it done in the accessor
program's code) than a file system sharing system, which (I imagine) would require
work external to the program to set up, and so be messier...
I am from the school where they teach you that if you have DB problems,
you don't go using it as a filesystem... The way I would do it is upload
every image with an image-id and a rev- id like 3-1.png or 99-123.jpg.
The database table for images contains the id's with, length, filesize,
and format. You just place a normal http request for the image. BUT
here's the thing instead of just running apache, we run a apache for the
php pages and some super-lightweigh server that just serves out the
images. it can be on the same or another server.. call it
images.en.wikipedia.org.. or
imagenes.es.wikipedia.org. Get y point?
that way we take some load from apache, who is much less efficient at
just serving out these single files because its so much larger, it has a
bunch of modules compiled into it and has to check things like rewrite
rules etc.. This is just a simple easy way to save some memory, and
since files are identified by a conbination of id and revision id, thre
is never any worry of accidentally overwritting something.
Thoughts or concerns? Yes I know it doesnt scale THAT well.. but at
the time we have 2 servers for something like 20 wikis. And unless money
starts falling magically out of the sky it might stay that way for a
while. I just don't see load balancers and clustering in the near
feature.. unless once the wikimedia foundations someone donates a whole
lot of money into it...
Lightning