On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 03:30 US/Pacific, Tim Starling wrote:
Perhaps we could set up test.wikipedia.org as an ISP-style user script directory, i.e. with open_basedir and disable_functions and all that. We could then make a simple upload form which allows people to upload scripts to it using a web interface.
I'm not suggesting someone else do this, I'm suggesting someone try to talk me out of it, if there's any reason it won't work.
Part of my concern is simply load management. A script gone wild can thrash through a big database and eat up memory and CPU cycles, while we're _trying_ to serve Wikipedia to the world at large.
Security-wise, in addition to files there's the database and memcached; memcached has no application-level security, so we'd probably want a separate daemon for it. Also the memcached daemon would need to be restarted for some tests to clear out bad data, which again would be better if it didn't interfere with the main servers.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)