On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 10:26:46 -0400, user_Jamesday user_jamesday@myrealbox.com wrote:
The 4U 6CPU is best for the US side. That's the main page building site and putting it there will help everyone who's logged in or getting a non-cached page. Because peak load times are different in different parts of the world, the same amount of resources for the central site delivers more benefit than dedicating them to any one place.
Yes, resource sharing is the most efficient scheme overall, but there are other reasons to consider splitting off the European Wikis onto their own dedicated hardware:
1) Politics/Psychology - Europeans might be more willing to donate if they knew that their contributions were going straight to the Euro servers, rather than contributing to "all" Wikis (which really means contributing to the English Wikis more than anything else).
2) Design Flexibility - Having a completely separate setup on the other side of the pond would allow (at least in theory) two completely different configurations. This could be useful for testing and comparing different architectures in the future.
3) Redundancy - What happens if Something Awful (tm) happens in Florida? Although we have an army of volunteers making regular off-site backups of the DB, it would still be nice to have an already-up-and-running duplicate site in place.
I'm sure there are more reasons.... although it's certainly an open question whether they outweigh the benefits of resource sharing. Thoughts?
-Bill Clark