On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 11:34:41 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
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.
I'd just assumed that mindset was already there, and thought that it
might impact the willingness of some to donate time and/or resources.
However, I see your point about wanting to discourage that attitude,
and so I guess that should trump other concerns.
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.
Sure it's true: Those new servers (except the Euro squid boxes) are
going to spend more cycles serving up English pages than any other
kind, just like all the other servers.
Granted, if they weren't serving up English pages then many of those
cycles would be wasted anyway -- but some people would probably rather
see some cycles wasted if it meant slightly better performance for the
pages in their own language.
That's the same attitude you've already said you want to strongly
discourage, though.
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.
I guess I was arguing more for using different clusters for different
Wikis, and you're right that this doesn't really have anything
directly to do with geography.
Truth be told, I've always been an opponent of centralization in any
form. I just don't trust the idea of having all of the machines in
the same location, watched over by the same engineers, configured the
same way, etc. Although it might be easier to reconfigure clusters if
they're in the same location, it means that the same people with the
same biases would be doing so.
So I guess my point was that geographic diversity would also imply
procedural and cultural diversity in the operation and configuration
of the equipment, and THAT could provide for more flexibility in
testing different ways of doing things. Maybe the French systems
administrators and network engineers would have a different way of
approaching a problem that wouldn't ever be tried if all of the
servers remained in Florida.
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.
I just worry about the eggs-in-one-basket scenarios: Airplanes
crashes, hurricanes and earthquakes (yes I know it's Florida :) and
things of that nature. Like I said, I'm fundamentally opposed to
centralization (and probably more than a bit paranoid).
If nobody else really sees much benefit to having an independent
datacenter setup, then I guess I'll stop trying to think up reasons to
justify it. :)
-Bill Clark