On 19/02/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/19/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
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
WMF is unique in that its bandwidth requirements are astronomical compared to its income. There are plenty of high-bandwidth sites. And plenty of low-budget sites. But there's nothing that comes close to Wikipedia in the proportion of the two. So if the (probably not that critical) problem is "how to host a huge amount of highly-requested content on a shoestring budget", it's not surprising that no one has attempted to solve it before.
LiveJournal is a slightly comparable site - a commercial site, but not terribly rich before the buyout. They developed useful toys like memcached because of their unique circumstances.
If it's going to go into Apache or whatever, it'll probably have to be us or people that love us that do it. Scratching that itch.
- d.