[Wikipedia-l] Re: slow hardware

Sat Oct 23 16:05:30 UTC 2004

NSK wrote:
> I notice that the WP site is very slow. I think WP is a victim of its growth.

According to Alexa we're in the 49th percentile for speed, so that's not 
that bad. And performance has been steadily improving over the last 
three years. This is because the average cost of providing each hit has 
been decreasing with increasing traffic due to better software, 
especially better caching. Our resources have been growing roughly in 
proportion to traffic.

> Have you thought of cooperating with some service like Coral? Or, you could 
> just build your own version of it.

Various mailing-list inhabitants have espoused the P2P pipe-dream, 
generally because they failed to consider the crippling problems of 
synchronisation and development time. There are technical reasons why a 
central database cluster is convenient, if you want to know about them I 
suggest you read the previous thread on this subject. There are various 
viable schemes for improving geographical distribution, which we have 
discussed in the past. However geographical distribution of hardware 
remains a touchy political subject. There's currently some Celerons in 
France which will be turned into squids as soon as someone takes them to 
a colocation centre and plugs them in.

> Dr. Stallman in his proposal for a universal learning resource explained why 
> this scheme is preferred.

According to a credible source, Dr. Stallman is our love slave.

-- Tim Starling