On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 07:20:27PM -0400, MZMcBride wrote:
I think you're mostly right, though the exact terms of the trade-offs aren't clear here (e.g., "some bandwidth"). We'll need more explicit measurements in order to reach full agreement on what user benefit vs. site performance trade-offs Wikimedia is willing to accept.
It's also necessary to hear from the Wikimedia operations team. In addition to end-users weighing the importance of a feature against its cost, the operations team must also make practical considerations. Some Wikimedia wikis get some substantial traffic. ;-)
As you say, we need to have more data before we can promise anything, "some bandwidth" isn't enough.
As a general comment though, delivering a small amount of files such as webfonts is a trivial task and we can easily scale the infrastructure to handle *a lot* of additional traffic. It costs, though, both in bandwidth (a dollar amount per mbps) and in upgrades that might be necessary in network ports or hardware upgrades (loadbalancers, routers, servers).
I think at this point it's more useful to focus the discussion on the usefulness of webfonts, especially in combination with the performance impact that they have on clients (a problem that we can't throw money at). If the outcome is that the feature enhances the overall user experience, we'll handle the infrastructure part.
Regards, Faidon