[WikiEN-l] An obscene example of remote loading

[Michael Noda]

On 1/28/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not offhand aware of a
> particularly shining example of a database-dump site, partly because
> we tend to outstrip them quite fast (and because enwiki dumps were
> iffy for quite a while, meaning most of them are long-stagnant)


I'm unfamiliar with the technical aspects of creating a database dump,
but is it the sort of thing that would be made better and faster by
throwing more computing resources at it?

I expect the answer to this question is "yes, but the Foundation is
$500,000 short, and those hypothetical servers went on the budget
chopping block on January 16th."  :-(  <rhetorical> When's the next
fundraiser? </rhetorical>

> There are certainly some decent offline projects using dumps, though,
> in one form or another.

Like, say, Google Earth, which I expect would be ecstatic if it could
get more frequent dumps.