On 11/22/07, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
On the other hand, I am convinced that "check usage" is essential for the Wikimedia projects on a wide scale.
As long as anything has to share resources with untrusted and unreviewed programs, it will probably not be possible for it to work as well as the trusted and reviewed programs working off the main clusters' resources, because the untrusted and unreviewed programs will tend to be relatively numerous and inefficient. Look at the load on the toolserver, and the replication lag on its database. Of course you could budget more funds for more servers, but my suspicion is that people would start using them more and lagging them more regardless. You're certainly never going to have as much funding as the main servers.
On the flip side of that, you can't just stick something like check usage up on the main servers without review by the people who are collectively available 24/7 to maintain those servers and the software running on them. Toolserver stuff is not centrally reviewed for security or performance issues, and the core devs/sysadmins are probably not familiar with how it works. It also tends to be somewhat tacked-on, and would be better if integrated properly into MediaWiki.
So I think the distinction between "carefully-maintained, high-availability software" and "toolserver stuff" will remain to some extent, and the goal needs to be to move the most valuable stuff to extensions or even core and run it on the main servers. But those are just my thoughts.