Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 01:04:27 +0200 From: Mark Bergsma mark@nedworks.org Subject: [Wikitech-l] Geographic DNS for wikipedia To: wikitech-l@wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4106DF7B.6030404@nedworks.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

Hi all,

Following up on the geographic DNS discussion on this list, triggered by the upcoming Squid servers in France, I proposed a solution to the developers/sysadmins on #mediawiki.

About six months ago, I implemented such a system for our IRC network Blitzed[1]. We have several servers distributed over the globe, and we thought it would be nice to send our users to a physically close server. That's not unlike the situation with wikipedia visitors and the squids in the US and France.

I remember reading about a similar system of the website of the FIFA 2002 in Korea/Japan. The problem there was that a system like this doesn't take advantage of the time difference in different areas of the world and therefore during the day in Asia the servers there were packed while the ones in Europe were idling around because everybdy was asleep there.

I don't know how it works for you but I see this as a potential problem.

Tobias Hesse