[Foundation-l] [Internal-l] Relocation Announcement

[Mark Bergsma]

Anthony wrote:
> On 9/24/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> A lot of things can be improved, but we can't increase the speed of
>> light.
>>
> It only takes light about 1/100th of a second to travel across the
> atlantic ocean.  Speed of light isn't the bottleneck.

It takes packets about 70ms to travel across the atlantic ocean and 
back, determined by the speed of light through fiber. Since a typical 
HTTP request requires a few of these round trips, the speed of light 
*is* the bottleneck.

And that's just one HTTP request. It would be way worse if we sent all 
the very many DB/memcached/DNS/etc lookups necessary to build a single 
wiki page over the atlantic...

-- 
Mark Bergsma <mark at wikimedia.org>
System & Network Administrator, Wikimedia Foundation