On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 3:50 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2008/10/11 Robert Ullmann rlullmann@gmail.com:
Look at this way: you can't get enwiki dumps more than once every six
weeks.
Each one TAKES SIX WEEKS. (modulo lots of stuff, I'm simplifying a bit
;-)
The example I have used before is going into my bank: in the main
Queensway
office, there will be 50-100 people on the queue. When there are 8-10 tellers, it will go well; except that some transactions (depositing some cash) take a minute or so, and some take many, many minutes. If there are
8
tellers, and 8 people in front of you with 20-30 minute transactions, you are toast. (They handle this by having fast lines for deposits and such
;-)
Your analogy is flawed. In that analogy the desire is to minimise the amount of time between walking in the door and completing your transaction, but in our case we desire to minimise the amount of time between a person completing one transaction and that person completing their next transaction in an ever repeating loop. The circumstances are not the same.
No, the analogy is exactly correct; your statement of the problem is not. There is no reason whatever that a hundred other projects should have to wait six weeks to be "fair", just because the enwiki takes that long. Just as there is no reason for the person with the 30 second daily transaction to wait behind someone spending 30 minutes settling their monthly KRA (tax authority) accounts.
We aren't going to get enwiki dumps more often than 6 weeks. (Unless/until whatever rearrangement Brion is planning.) But at the same time, there is no reason whatever that smaller projects can't get dumps every week consistently; they just need a thread that only serves them. Just like that "deposits only in 500's and '1000's bills" teller at the bank.