On 18/02/07, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Serving a wiki isn't hosting an .iso file, where
of course, bandwidth
is main cost, and it is easy to offload. ISO files don't change,
people don't care about how fast they start getting ISO file, because
the transfer is long enough to forget all startup costs.
Serving a wiki isn't looking for aliens. If someone turns off the
computer, or DSL will go down, aliens won't disappear, now the
request will. Nobody really cares about individual packet containing
alien information, because it is sent to multiple nodes. Some will
reply, some won't.
Serving a wiki isn't serving a personal website. It is not single
person editing, there's great deal of conflict resolution, possible
race conditions, versioning and metadata information.
Serving a wiki isn't serving a conventional media website, because it
is far more organic in terms of load pattern evolution, or accidental
surges. Content formats also come bottom->up, requiring agile
development of systems.
Serving a wiki means delivering user contributed content thousands
collaborated on in few tens of milliseconds. We do succeed this
mission and every time we increased responsiveness of the site, we
had more users coming.
Fucking *excellent* post, Domas.
Rob Church