At 10:51 AM 1/16/2004, you wrote:
*Please* implement a *completely independent watchlist-server*. Since Wikipedia is growing exponential modularizing it is the only way to survive. It could also help attracting programmers that do not like to get into a big monolithic program like MediaWiki that you can almost only use for Wikipedia.
This may be an old idea, or not. But the thought of modularizing did bring a thought to mind that is related to how Ebay does things...
What if the articles in a certain alphabetic range were stored on one server, and those in another alphabetic range stored on another? A third server stands in front doing nothing more than redirecting traffic to the other servers. It might make statistics and such a bit more of a headache, but it would certainly assist in reducing the bandwidth requirements of the server.
Whether such an implementation would be simplistic or terribly difficult requires a greater understanding of the underlying architecture than I have.
Just a thought.
-Kelly