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