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

[James Forrester]

On 25/09/2007, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > On 9/24/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> >
> >> It's also a negligible improvement on technical grounds. If you look at
> >> the time it takes between a user requesting a page on one of our sites
> >> and them getting the result, trans-oceanic packet transmission times are
> >> not anywhere near the bottleneck.
> >>
> >
> > A user? ... you mean a reader?  If they have a decent broadband
> > connection then latency overwhelmingly dominates their load times.
> >
> > [...]
> > A lot of things can be improved, but we can't increase the speed of
> > light. Closeness counts.
> >
>
> As someone located in California, the BBC loads orders of magnitude
> faster for me pretty much every time, despite being across the ocean. If
> transatlantic distances were the main factor, the BBC ought to be
> perceptibly slow (it isn't, it loads nearly instantly), while Wikipedia
> ought to be fast (it isn't, it takes time before it even starts serving
> me pages, especially on large pages).
>
> I'd say if we could get it to the point where Wikipedia was loading as
> fast in the UK as the BBC loads in the US, we'd be in a good position.

Umm... the BBC has a very large number of computers in the US
(specifically, in Telehouse NY). Wikimedia does not have any computers
in the UK[*]. I thought everyone interested in websites knew this. :-)

Aha: http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/network/ Knew it was around
somewhere. Actually, I'm surprised that they only have a pair of
OC-12s for each of Sprint and L3 - I'd have thought that they'd need
more given their peering arrangements.

[*] - And WMF shouldn't ever have servers in the UK. Servers are
assets which would be confiscated within a week, I'd imagine - UK
jurisprudence means that WMF is under (the highly Internet-unfriendly)
UK law *right now*, just that Her Majesty's Court Service has no
ability to enforce asset-stripping remedies.

Yrs,
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforrester at wikimedia.org | jdforrester at gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]