On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 11:34:41 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
a. "contributions... going straight to the Euro servers, rather than contributing to 'all' wikis" -- this is a mindset that I want to strongly discourage, the mindset of nationalism or regionalism. We are a global project, and I don't want people to start thinking of "our" wikipedia versus "their" wikipedia.
I'd just assumed that mindset was already there, and thought that it might impact the willingness of some to donate time and/or resources. However, I see your point about wanting to discourage that attitude, and so I guess that should trump other concerns.
b. "which really means contributing to the English Wikis more than anything else" -- if someone contributes to fr wikipedia, it is just not true that because the servers are in America, this amounts to contributing to en more than anything else.
Sure it's true: Those new servers (except the Euro squid boxes) are going to spend more cycles serving up English pages than any other kind, just like all the other servers.
Granted, if they weren't serving up English pages then many of those cycles would be wasted anyway -- but some people would probably rather see some cycles wasted if it meant slightly better performance for the pages in their own language.
That's the same attitude you've already said you want to strongly discourage, though.
But geographical remoteness is *less* flexible in this regard. For any N servers, we are more flexible with them in one location rather than 2, because servers could be pulled or added to a test cluster with a different architecture as we see fit.
I guess I was arguing more for using different clusters for different Wikis, and you're right that this doesn't really have anything directly to do with geography.
Truth be told, I've always been an opponent of centralization in any form. I just don't trust the idea of having all of the machines in the same location, watched over by the same engineers, configured the same way, etc. Although it might be easier to reconfigure clusters if they're in the same location, it means that the same people with the same biases would be doing so.
So I guess my point was that geographic diversity would also imply procedural and cultural diversity in the operation and configuration of the equipment, and THAT could provide for more flexibility in testing different ways of doing things. Maybe the French systems administrators and network engineers would have a different way of approaching a problem that wouldn't ever be tried if all of the servers remained in Florida.
First, in terms of having redundancy, it makese sense to first look at the most likely points of failure. Since we are colocation in an excellent professional facility with tons of redundancy, the chances of the colo itself going down are very low. I lie awake at nights worrying about zwinger, not about the facility itself.
I just worry about the eggs-in-one-basket scenarios: Airplanes crashes, hurricanes and earthquakes (yes I know it's Florida :) and things of that nature. Like I said, I'm fundamentally opposed to centralization (and probably more than a bit paranoid).
If nobody else really sees much benefit to having an independent datacenter setup, then I guess I'll stop trying to think up reasons to justify it. :)
-Bill Clark