[Foundation-l] new site notice now ready

[Domas Mituzas]

Hi!

> Wikimedia servers would still have to do a
> tiny bit of work, basically sign stuff and boostrap the peer lists.
> It could be built, and for a lot less than 1.5 million.

Does anyone talking here about distributed mediawiki has ever  
realized what tasks are being worked on in our application cluster?
Could you please stop speaking bullshit, packed as a "clever stuff",  
and using foundation-l audience to support you in any way?

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.

Please, if you ever again suggest building some distributed  
wikipedia at home, please please please, do some research. Sure you may  
look cool and trendy, but... that doesn't help with our goals.

There're no big systems even little bit similar to wikipedia, that  
are distributed. If you point me to any, I'd gladly review their  
ideas. Now there are none.

BR,
-- 
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]