Bill Clark wrote:
Yes, resource sharing is the most efficient scheme
overall, but there
are other reasons to consider splitting off the European Wikis onto
their own dedicated hardware:
1) Politics/Psychology - Europeans might be more willing to donate if
they knew that their contributions were going straight to the Euro
servers, rather than contributing to "all" Wikis (which really means
contributing to the English Wikis more than anything else).
Although I do think that under the general heading
"Politics/Psychology" there is something to be said for European
hardware, I disagree with the way that you put it, in two major
respects:
a. "contributions... going straight to the Euro servers, rather than
contributing to 'all' wikis" -- this is a mindset that I want to
strongly discourage, the mindset of nationalism or regionalism. We
are a global project, and I don't want people to start thinking of
"our" wikipedia versus "their" wikipedia.
b. "which really means contributing to the English Wikis more than
anything else" -- if someone contributes to fr wikipedia, it is just
not true that because the servers are in America, this amounts to
contributing to en more than anything else.
What I would say is that it enhances the global nature of our mission
if some servers are in Europe (and Asia) *whenever technical matters
warrant it*. But the project itself is not and must not become a
series of disconnected regional projects operating independently and
perhaps in conflict.
2) Design Flexibility - Having a completely separate
setup on the
other side of the pond would allow (at least in theory) two completely
different configurations. This could be useful for testing and
comparing different architectures in the future.
But geographical remoteness is *less* flexible in this regard. For
any N servers, we are more flexible with them in one location rather
than 2, because servers could be pulled or added to a test cluster
with a different architecture as we see fit.
3) Redundancy - What happens if Something Awful (tm)
happens in
Florida? Although we have an army of volunteers making regular
off-site backups of the DB, it would still be nice to have an
already-up-and-running duplicate site in place.
Yes, it would be nice, to be sure, but there are a couple of things
to realize:
First, in terms of having redundancy, it makese sense to first look at
the most likely points of failure. Since we are colocation in an
excellent professional facility with tons of redundancy, the chances
of the colo itself going down are very low. I lie awake at nights
worrying about zwinger, not about the facility itself.
Second, it certainly "would be nice" to have a fully redundant
duplicate site somewhere, but the cost would be exorbitant compared to
the likelihood of ever needing it.
---
I fully support using these celerons as squids in Europe, because it
might have some tiny performance benefits, and because it doesn't lead
down a path of complexity, and because I think it is a nice political
gesture.
--Jimbo