On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 3:50 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
2008/10/11 Robert Ullmann
<rlullmann(a)gmail.com>om>:
Look at this way: you can't get enwiki dumps
more than once every six
weeks.
Each one TAKES SIX WEEKS. (modulo lots of stuff,
I'm simplifying a bit
;-)
The example I have used before is going into my bank: in the main
Queensway
office, there will be 50-100 people on the queue.
When there are 8-10
tellers, it will go well; except that some transactions (depositing some
cash) take a minute or so, and some take many, many minutes. If there are
8
tellers, and 8 people in front of you with 20-30
minute transactions, you
are toast. (They handle this by having fast lines for deposits and such
;-)
Your analogy is flawed. In that analogy the desire is to minimise the
amount of time between walking in the door and completing your
transaction, but in our case we desire to minimise the amount of time
between a person completing one transaction and that person completing
their next transaction in an ever repeating loop. The circumstances
are not the same.
No, the analogy is exactly correct; your statement of the problem is not.
There is no reason whatever that a hundred other projects should have to
wait six weeks to be "fair", just because the enwiki takes that long. Just
as there is no reason for the person with the 30 second daily transaction to
wait behind someone spending 30 minutes settling their monthly KRA (tax
authority) accounts.
We aren't going to get enwiki dumps more often than 6 weeks. (Unless/until
whatever rearrangement Brion is planning.) But at the same time, there is no
reason whatever that smaller projects can't get dumps every week
consistently; they just need a thread that only serves them. Just like that
"deposits only in 500's and '1000's bills" teller at the bank.