Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Domas describes the status quo. He does describe it well. It does however not detract one iota from the usefulness of doing this research.
It is a great piece of research. However, is it Wikipedia's or WMF's thing to do this? It seems like a generic web component, almost like Apache, the PHP programming language or the Squid proxy server. If the fully distributed web server architecture was a really good idea, many kinds of websites could find use for it and someone else might already have implemented it. Even if this technology existed, it isn't clear that it should be deployed at WMF in Florida, but perhaps instead at Kennisnet in Amsterdam, as a way to offload the Squid servers.
Rather than discussing this on wikitech-l, perhaps you should take the idea to people who develop Apache and Squid? Then when a working prototype exists, perhaps it can be tried and evaluated for some part of Wikipedia. Since I don't know of any existing technology today, it seems to be at least several years into the future before it can help to reduce WMF's bandwidth costs.