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

[Andre Engels]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Tim Starling wrote:

> 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.

Would it not be better to keep the mirrors read-only, and have them redirect
to the master for write-access? To have writing in several places causes
significant overhead in avoiding edit conflicts and such.

Andre Engels