Hoi, Domas describes the status quo. He does describe it well. It does however not detract one iota from the usefulness of doing this research. Mechanisms are developed that may work at a fraction of our current (ie WMF) cost, for the WMF it is irresponsible to be against such a research project. It does not matter if you think the VU will succeed or not, what matters is that serious effort is put into this endeavour. Just wait and watch what will transpire when it does.
It is not as if there is no need to maintain and improve our current code. It is not as if this project will be finished at the end of the year. Domas is right in that nothing changes for now.
It is however a really relevant project and I believe we should cheer them on for trying this in the first place. Thanks, GerardM
Rob Church schreef:
On 18/02/07, Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com wrote:
Serving a wiki isn't hosting an .iso file, where of course, bandwidth is main cost, and it is easy to offload. ISO files don't change, people don't care about how fast they start getting ISO file, because the transfer is long enough to forget all startup costs. Serving a wiki isn't looking for aliens. If someone turns off the computer, or DSL will go down, aliens won't disappear, now the request will. Nobody really cares about individual packet containing alien information, because it is sent to multiple nodes. Some will reply, some won't. Serving a wiki isn't serving a personal website. It is not single person editing, there's great deal of conflict resolution, possible race conditions, versioning and metadata information. Serving a wiki isn't serving a conventional media website, because it is far more organic in terms of load pattern evolution, or accidental surges. Content formats also come bottom->up, requiring agile development of systems. Serving a wiki means delivering user contributed content thousands collaborated on in few tens of milliseconds. We do succeed this mission and every time we increased responsiveness of the site, we had more users coming.
Fucking *excellent* post, Domas.
Rob Church