Steve Bennett wrote:
Hi all, After the previous thread, I ask out of curiosity, what if there were just a small number of servers spread around the world, not owned by the WMF. Something like:
- Users can access en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia-brazil.org,
en.wikipedia-japan.org etc interchangeably
- Each site is a complete copy of the database, and capable of serving
independently
- Every change on one database is immediately replicated to the others
- To make this worthwhile, all the servers except the original are
owned and operated by third parties on a sponsorship arrangement, presumably meaning they get to discreetly stick a logo somewhere
Is this sort of thing technically feasible? The clear advantage is faster response time for people near one of the overseas hosts, especially when just browsing.
We can acheive faster response time just by having HTTP proxies with keep-alive working properly. Response times of RTT to Florida plus server overhead should be possible for most of Europe and Asia, currently it's more like 6 x RTT + overhead, due to TCP connection setup and slow-start.
The great advantage to this is that it can and will be done in the next few days, we don't have to wait for all these pipe dreams to magically come to fruition.
-- Tim Starling