RE: local search support

> 1. Goba's idea of putting a dedicated box for a > search engine 2. Simply distribute the search to the mirrors > that provide local search support (instead of having just > ca.php.net - I believe it was called like that) > > The dedicated box has a problem that somebody has to offer it > and I'm afraid it will take forever (just like the European > rsync server that it was finally droped as an idea). The > distribution of the searches to the mirrors I believe is > something simple to do. > > Those are just thoughts and doesn't mean that I'm > complaining. I'm just trying to help... > I haven't been following this post, so please ignore any of the below which is contrary to something that has already been discussed: ) Distributing the search / visitors to random mirrors may not be such a great thing to do. In a good number of circumstances, it is bound to give real slow speeds to visitors. For example, We had deployed a set of application servers in our Indian Datacenter. This application was accessed by thousands of customers across the globe. In general we had no speed issues for visitors from India and the US. But visitors from other countries used to complain quite a bit about the speed factor due to which we had to shift this set of servers to the US. By complain quite a bit, I mean - QUITE A BIT. This is because the India has international connectivity to the US only. I think a similar situation exists for many other countries. If the current situation has gotten out of hand then this solution can be implemented as a temporary hack. But doing this on a permanent basis is not such a good idea. In the long run , we can look at preparing a list of mirrors that are fast globally and have enabled local search. The easy way to do this would be figure out the countries that are well connected and then assume that every mirror in it will not have speed issues. ) I can see that a good amount of discussion is made towards shifting visitors to mirrors. This is a good idea, not only from the perspective of taking the load off the primary servers, but also the fact that local mirrors improve the visitors browsing experience significantly due to the faster accessibility. However, has anyone considered the fact that php may start losing mirrors because of a sudden burst in bandwidth on the mirror sites. If mirror sponsoring companies suddenly realize that they have to shell out 10 times more bandwidth, then some of them may decide to shut down their mirrors. Some of the mirror servers may not even be capable of handling the extra traffic. Keeping the above in mind, it may be a good idea to review the policy of allowing only 2 mirrors per country and change this to 3-4 per country. In fact, the well connected countries should be allowed to have more mirrors than the others. If everyone here agrees on this then we could even look at the achieves of this list and contact the companies that have been refused earlier because their country already had 2 mirrors. - Div