On 19/02/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 2/19/07, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)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.