On 12/4/06, Ivan Krstić <krstic(a)solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
Yes, Ivan; that's why Jeff suggested
provisioning more powerful
platforms.
Wikipedia has so far followed the approach of scaling out instead of up,
and that with commodity hardware. If you believe this approach is
mistaken, you'll need to explain what you know about scaling server
farms that Google doesn't.
You do realize that Google has spent the better part of a half billion
dollars on engineering a completely ground-up distributed system software
architecture, working with a problem that (unusually among largescale
enterprise data management) can theoretically be efficiently partitioned?
The reason not everyone is using Google-like IT architectures is
A) That they can't afford to develop it, and
B) That in most cases, that architecture would be worse than what they have
now, given that most IT problems don't partition so well...
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com