Bill Clark wrote:
Yes, resource sharing is the most efficient scheme overall, but there are other reasons to consider splitting off the European Wikis onto their own dedicated hardware:
- Politics/Psychology - Europeans might be more willing to donate if
they knew that their contributions were going straight to the Euro servers, rather than contributing to "all" Wikis (which really means contributing to the English Wikis more than anything else).
Although I do think that under the general heading "Politics/Psychology" there is something to be said for European hardware, I disagree with the way that you put it, in two major respects:
a. "contributions... going straight to the Euro servers, rather than contributing to 'all' wikis" -- this is a mindset that I want to strongly discourage, the mindset of nationalism or regionalism. We are a global project, and I don't want people to start thinking of "our" wikipedia versus "their" wikipedia.
b. "which really means contributing to the English Wikis more than anything else" -- if someone contributes to fr wikipedia, it is just not true that because the servers are in America, this amounts to contributing to en more than anything else.
What I would say is that it enhances the global nature of our mission if some servers are in Europe (and Asia) *whenever technical matters warrant it*. But the project itself is not and must not become a series of disconnected regional projects operating independently and perhaps in conflict.
- Design Flexibility - Having a completely separate setup on the
other side of the pond would allow (at least in theory) two completely different configurations. This could be useful for testing and comparing different architectures in the future.
But geographical remoteness is *less* flexible in this regard. For any N servers, we are more flexible with them in one location rather than 2, because servers could be pulled or added to a test cluster with a different architecture as we see fit.
- Redundancy - What happens if Something Awful (tm) happens in
Florida? Although we have an army of volunteers making regular off-site backups of the DB, it would still be nice to have an already-up-and-running duplicate site in place.
Yes, it would be nice, to be sure, but there are a couple of things to realize:
First, in terms of having redundancy, it makese sense to first look at the most likely points of failure. Since we are colocation in an excellent professional facility with tons of redundancy, the chances of the colo itself going down are very low. I lie awake at nights worrying about zwinger, not about the facility itself.
Second, it certainly "would be nice" to have a fully redundant duplicate site somewhere, but the cost would be exorbitant compared to the likelihood of ever needing it.
---
I fully support using these celerons as squids in Europe, because it might have some tiny performance benefits, and because it doesn't lead down a path of complexity, and because I think it is a nice political gesture.
--Jimbo