Aryeh Gregor hett schreven:
Worst case all text requests for Commons go to the backend directly, right?
Yes, and this is disastrous. It would mean load on the application servers would increase by a factor of twenty or a hundred or more. Even if only for Commons, it could be a huge increase in load. Keeping the Squid hit rate as high as possible is absolutely essential to keep the site running properly, barring a huge investment in new hardware.
Remember that if you even create two variants that are widely used, you've come reasonably close to doubling load on the backend. Only one person from each variant needs to view any given revision of a page to force the backend to generate two copies instead of one. Causing visits to Commons to be split into twenty different languages might double backend load by itself. That's just not tenable.
In principle, one could imagine hacking Squid to be smart enough to cache contents and interface separately, and paste them together on view about as quickly as it can serve plain requests now. But I don't know how feasible that would be in practice.
Content on Commons is language-dependant too, so that's no solution.
Can anybody please give some numbers? How severely would the squid hit rate go down? How many servers would be necessary to compensate? How much would this cost? We need numbers to make a decision like that. Please spend some seconds to think about what we are speaking: At the moment a user needs to be logged-in and additionally he needs to enter the preferences menu (which is in English) and select a language he knows. But most people do not change the preferences. Most people are not even logged in. Most people do not even know English (at least 3/4 of the world's population). We render Commons unusable or at least less usable for at least 90% of the world.
Basically it's exactly the same situation as back in 2001 when people discussed whether Wikipedia should go multilingual. I hope nobody rejects that step even though it would have saved us so much resources in the last 9 years.
Marcus Buck