[Wikipedia-l] Mirroring (was Re: Fundraising)

[Tim Starling]

Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:

> Sorry for my newbies question, but there's something i dont understand. Many web site around the world have only one DB server and many load balancing web server. Slashdot for example IIRC. Ok it must be a quadri processor... but it's very fast !
> 
> I'm not really sure, that pliny is the bottleneck.
> 
> The Larousse server is a piii866, it's a bit short for what we want to do I think. I hope the next upgrade will improve Larousse, then we'll can move other wikis to it. And we'll see if Pliny is really the bottleneck.
> 
> My 2 cents

I was suggesting making a read-only mirror by mirroring the database 
rather than just the HTML. Every time a page is updated on the main DB 
server, an update would automatically be sent to the mirror. It's a very 
simple method, which meets Daniel's requirements of short latency. The 
idea would be that the mirror would serve web pages by getting articles 
from its local copy of the database, rather than from the other side of 
the world or country or whatever.

We could even set up a full read-write server on the other side of the 
world, and redirect users to a different domain name as they arrive, 
based on their location. Users could specify their preferred mirror in 
their user preferences. We could even make larousse the default for 
logged-in users, that way most edits go to a web server which is close 
to the master DB.

-- Tim Starling.