Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote: before, but I don't read articles for hashed, consistency changes in articles revoked after fending off the from the This sounds like a good idea, but we have two servers. Are you offering to donate the other 8? every more We have a dirt road. When we start building the highway, we can talk about onramps. -- Tim Starling <../t/starling/physics/unimelb/edu/au>

On Thu, 2003-09-11 at 17:44, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote: We've got about 3-4 edits per minute. Distributing writes sounds like a lot more trouble than it's worth, possibly leading to all kinds of consistency troubles on shared resources (link tables...). Tacking on replicated database server(s) to handle read-only requests (hundreds per minute) would be simpler and less fragile (slave dies, just take it out of rotation and -no- pages become inaccessible; master dies, just declare one of the slaves the new master). Before we bother about anything like that, we just need a decently fast machine for the web server! -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote: I hate to kill good ideas and discussion, and I'd love to work out the technical details of a distributed solution, but it's also extremely frustrating to work on a complicated solution when it turns out that nobody really needs it, so let's run through the old arguments again, just like a check list. Yes, application-level distribution has been discussed, but even though nobody thinks it is right out impossible it has never been implemented, because it doesn't solve any problem that we have. The first question that a proposal must answer is: What problem are you trying to solve? Wikipedia itself is the solution to a problem: How to create a free encyclopedia, especially without getting bogged down in the editorial process of Nupedia. For this, standard components are used, such as Apache, PHP, and MySQL. We could invent our own programming language or database, but we don't, becuase it could get us sidetracked, make us lose focus of the original goal. However, Wikipedia has developed its own wiki software, abandoning the existing UseModWiki software. So there is a fine line between inventing the new and using the existing. The innovations in the Wikipedia PHP script, that makes a difference from UseModWiki, are mainly aimed at supporting the editorial process (namespaces, statistics, uploads, etc.), or user experience (skins) and not towards performance architecture. As far as I know, there are no distributed wikis in the world. Wikipedia is the world's biggest wiki, and would be the first to need such a solution, but so far runs at a single site. One "popular" problem to discuss is work load and response times. However, with the current software architecture (PHP + Apache + MySQL) it is possible to distribute the work load over a large number of computers at a single site without any application-level distribution. It is also possible to identify software bottle necks and improve the performance without adding hardware. Wikipedia has been "slow" before, when it had far less work load than today, and some people thought this was the end of the road, but software improvements showed that it was possible to handle the load. In addition to the technical challenge, application-level distribution brings many new problems with contract law and administration: Who runs each site? What are the legal contracts between those responsible for each site? What to do if a site becomes unavailable or goes out of business? Etc. Those problems are avoided by sticking to a single site. If you propose a distributed solution, you would have to include answers to these administrative and legal questions. Still, there is a possibility that new kinds of problems can be solved by a distributed architecture. What about the Russian users who have to pay extra for accessing international websites, but can use Russian websites within their flat fee subscription plan? If this problem can be addressed by a distributed server inside Russia, you would have to answer who can run it and what does it cost to keep it updated if Internet traffic across the border is not flat rate? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/