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

[Tim Starling]

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Andre Engels wrote:
> 
>>On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Tim Starling wrote:
>>
>>>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.

I've decided that Andre may be right about this. Editors should be 
redirected to larousse when they log in, and anonymous users should be 
redirected when they click edit. If people were allowed to log in to the 
mirrors, you'd have to use HTTP redirects in order to log them in to 
larousse when they started editing.

> There is a lot of hypothesis and discussion here.  Have you considered
> that there are some 40-60 page views for every single edit? What about
> using some real statistics instead of guessing?  (Just my hypothesis.)

Statistics are pretty useless without profiling/benchmarking. We know 
that there are many more views than edits, but we don't know the load on 
the server for each. Edits are far more expensive than views, for a 
number of reasons.

Would it be possible to generate some profiling data for the live wiki? 
Say, turning on $wgProfiling for one in every thousand requests to 
wiki.phtml?

-- Tim Starling