Hi all, After the previous thread, I ask out of curiosity, what if there were just a small number of servers spread around the world, not owned by the WMF. Something like:

- Users can access en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia-brazil.org, en.wikipedia-japan.org etc interchangeably - Each site is a complete copy of the database, and capable of serving independently - Every change on one database is immediately replicated to the others - To make this worthwhile, all the servers except the original are owned and operated by third parties on a sponsorship arrangement, presumably meaning they get to discreetly stick a logo somewhere

Is this sort of thing technically feasible? The clear advantage is faster response time for people near one of the overseas hosts, especially when just browsing. I can see obvious problems with the replication (ie, two competing requests arriving simultaneously), and what happens when a link fails for an extended period of time. Perhaps a simpler model:

- Read requests are fulfilled by these distributed servers - All write requests are sent to the one central server which immediately pushes out a "dirty page" notification (but not page content) to the other servers - The distributed servers fetch updated pages when a user requests a "dirty page", or perhaps after some time period, to avoid the whole database becoming too out of date

This model would rely on the fact that the vast majority of requests are reads, not writes, and attempts to reduce the impact of a page which is heavily modified by one server, while infrequently requested on another.

Thoughts? I'm obviously not a network or database engineer so I'm just wondering if this would be a workable or useful solution. It at least avoids the problems of untrusted servers, unreliable servers, and gives an additional benefit in responsiveness.

Steve