Hello all,
with the beginning of the next year (2011) I will not longer accept new interwiki-bot-accounts, if: [...]
While we're at it - in the future, we shall have interwiki bots reading the replicated data bases to a great extent while gathering informations about existing and prseumably missing interwiki links. This will be sparing lots of request to the wmf servers which will then be bothered only when wiki pages are actually altered.
Using the replicated data instead of making http (api) requests should speed up the data collection phase of large inteerwiki groups from several minutes to a seconds or so.
Another approach of making interwiki bots use the replicated data would be to pre-process their interwiki data into a list or table of versioned change requests, being published on the toolserver. Interwiki worker bots running elsewhere would pick requests from the list & process them. Picked requests are postponed for a while until replicated data renders them done, or until a timeout (>replication lag) is exhausted.
Greetings - Purodha