[Foundation-l] [Internal-l] Relocation Announcement

Tue Sep 25 04:58:19 UTC 2007

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 9/24/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>   
>> It's also a negligible improvement on technical grounds. If you look at
>> the time it takes between a user requesting a page on one of our sites
>> and them getting the result, trans-oceanic packet transmission times are
>> not anywhere near the bottleneck.
>>     
>
> A user? ... you mean a reader?  If they have a decent broadband
> connection then latency overwhelmingly dominates their load times.
>
> [...]
> A lot of things can be improved, but we can't increase the speed of
> light. Closeness counts.
>   

As someone located in California, the BBC loads orders of magnitude 
faster for me pretty much every time, despite being across the ocean. If 
transatlantic distances were the main factor, the BBC ought to be 
perceptibly slow (it isn't, it loads nearly instantly), while Wikipedia 
ought to be fast (it isn't, it takes time before it even starts serving 
me pages, especially on large pages).

I'd say if we could get it to the point where Wikipedia was loading as 
fast in the UK as the BBC loads in the US, we'd be in a good position.

-Mark