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

[Brian McNeil]

Anthony wrote:
 
>> >> 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...
>>
>> > If you didn't pipeline them.  But why in the world would you do that?
>>
>> Because of the "update everywhere problem". Data of which multiple
>> copies exist either needs all copies updated atomically (impractical due
>> to the latency we were talking about) or needs to synced/merged later,
>> with all the fun conflict resolution problems you will get.
>>
>I can't figure out what your response has to do with the question.
>What is it we're talking about, again?

The issue is doing more than having a proxy farm (or farms) outside the US.

You simply can't form a cluster over the US-NL distances due to latency. If
you want to see state of the art in clustering look up OpenVMS, something
like VMS Clustering is the ideal (but too expensive) solution to having a
disaster tolerant cluster. That wouldn't be one set of servers in one
country and one in another unless you did the U.S. and Canada. I can't
recall the limits on cluster distances, but you could - IIRC - set up a 3
site cluster, each in a different state. As VMS Clustering is
shared-everything your disk arrays would be replicated across the three
sites - even if one site gets nuked you keep running, worst-case is someone
can't reach you until DNS updates.


Brian.