[Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

Fri Jul 28 04:12:56 UTC 2006

mboverload wrote:
> I just talked to the developers, they said they're fine right now for
> processing AND bandwidth, bandwidth has not been a problem.

There's not really such a thing as not having enough bandwidth, for our purposes.

When you hear us talk about bandwidth, the issue under discussion is not whether
we have enough, but simply ensuring that we're getting a good deal for our money
(our money, of course, being donors' money).

That's something that's being actively worked on.

As for processing, we have no difficulties at this time in that regard either,
but that doesn't mean we won't need more machines.

We're simply always balancing these factors:

* Increased load from growth in use of the site
* Decreased load from improvements to the efficiency of the software
* Decreased load from obtaining additional hardware

There's no problem per se; it's simply a natural consequence of growth in usage
that we require more resources over time. A newspaper company would need to buy
more printing presses and rent more delivery trucks as circulation increased;
for us it's no different.

Of course in a for-profit business that ran on subscriptions or ad revenue,
there would (hopefully!) be a direct correlation between additional page views
and additional income; for us it's less direct, but hopefully more eyeballs will
continue to mean more donors until the foundation comes up with another business
plan. ;)

Hopefully, we can continue to keep ahead of the curve a little bit, rather than
allowing hardware bottlenecks to become a visible problem as they have several
times in the past.

Our next purchase is additional caching proxy servers; these are essential to
keeping pages flowing since they handle most of the visitor and image traffic,
and the current ones are expected to start dragging as the back-to-school
traffic peak comes at the end of the summer.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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