Jeroen-
Hello,
Proberly some of you will flame me, but I will take that for granted.
My idea is to combine all the European language wikipedia's (except english and maybe spanish and portuguese) on one server and using one database, located somewhere in Europe.
Crashes that are so hard that they require someone to do a fix on location should be expected to take about 24 hours to fix -- that's normal and OK. The present crash took about 7 hours to fix (we still don't know what caused it), and it would have taken just a few minutes if I or Tim could have done the reboot instead of waiting for Jimbo to wake up. Hopefully Brion will be back soon as well.
Splitting up the wikis can cause the following problems: * makes software updates harder -- we are trying to move towards a common codebase * makes it impossible to combine the different tables into a single database, which would have various advantages * makes it more difficult to combine at least user accounts and interlanguage links into a single DB * could lead to cultural split -- different power structures, different policies etc.
Furthermore, Jimbo is in the process of finalizing the Wikimedia Foundation, which will allow us to take donations. Given enough money, we can improve our current setup. A reasonably redundant database setup with replication should be more resistant to this kind of failure.
Realistically, with a decent setup, we don't need to split up our databases -- it's the single point of failure (pliny) that is the problem, not that the server is based in the US.
Regards,
Erik