On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, Tim Starling wrote:
Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
I know ideas
for a distributed Wikipedia have been discussed here
haven't seen the following angle before (this may just be because I
my mail carefully enough of course):
> [ Idea. ]
This sounds like a good idea, but we have two servers.
Are you
offering to donate the other 8?
I have already seen mails from several people volunteering bandwidth and server
space around the world here.
Wikipedia is such a useful, likeable and interesting project that I can't
imagine it would be hard to find lots of people with large servers and fast
lines to help out.
Just think of the guys at universities running those gigantic FTP mirrors.
I don't think the lack of servers it the reason Wikipedia isn't a distributed
system.
> Wouldn't it be worth looking into? It seems
increased demand eats up
> regular measure taken (kind of like congested highways becoming even
> congested when they're expanded).
We have a dirt road. When we start building the
highway, we can talk
about onramps.
Building capacity in small incremental steps hasn't given Wikipedia more than a
month's respite or two before things are bogged down again. I think a
distribued version could more or less do away with the capacity problem. (Since
each article lives a separate life with it's own history, Wikipedia is actually
ideal for running across a bunch of servers.) I don't think clever cacheing or
two new Opteron processors can.
-- Daniel