On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 19:59:40 +0300, NSK nsk2@wikinerds.org wrote:
I notice that the WP site is very slow. I think WP is a victim of its growth.
Have you thought of cooperating with some service like Coral? Or, you could just build your own version of it.
Various ways of distributing the server load are indeed always being considered. If you look at the diagram on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers you will see that while not *geographically* distributed, the current system is not exactly what you'd call "flat". :D
I believe further proposed enancements include the purchase of "squid" proxy servers in different countries (I tihnk somebody was in the process of trying this in France), with some kind of geographical server selection. There was also talk of using something called "Super Sparrow", or a similar solution, which is also related to this issue.
The biggest problem, though, and why we can't simply piggy-back a general-use replication network like Coral seems to be, is that by its very nature, Wikipedia content is not static, and it is imperative that we can keep track of what version is being served to whom. In the current setup, the software is able to flush out-of-date pages from the various 'squid' caches when they are edited, so that things like removal of vandalism won't take an arbitrary amount of time to filter through to normal users. Any wider distribution system needs to retain this per-article control.
Plus, a lot of the slow-down is from people using inherently un-distributable features like editing pages, or refreshing their watchlists. It *might* be possible to create some kind of wikiP2Pedia[tm], where the database itself was more widely distributed, but it would be no simple feat of software engineering...