From:
eclipse.org-planning-council-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:eclipse.org-planning-council-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bjorn
Freeman-Benson
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2007 12:38 PM
To: Cross project issues; eclipse.org-planning-council; 'Denis Roy';
Mike Milinkovich; emo@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [eclipse.org-planning-council] eclipse.org server usage
patternsversus new innovative tools
Planning Council, Cross Projects List, EMO,
The eclipse.org IT infrastructure (cvs, svn, bugzilla, wiki, eclipsecon, etc)
is designed to support current usage patterns and expected growth to those
patterns. Innovation in frameworks and tools can affect those usage patterns. I
think we should write up a policy for how Eclipse projects should assist the
EMO in planning for usage pattern changes.
For example, our CVS system is designed around the historic usage pattern of
developers syncing up with the HEAD, doing some work, then committing their
changes, iterating a few times a day, maybe a dozen times a day. But what if
the Team-CVS project team wanted to include a "automatically check for
changes" feature in the Team-CVS code. If the automatic part ran
frequently (every few minutes), this might impose a large load on the
eclipse.org CVS servers and bandwidth - a dramatic change to the usage pattern.
And yet we don't want to discourage innovation like this because it could be a
great feature for end users.
We (the EMO) would want to be involved in design decisions so that we can
understand what the usage pattern changes and their impacts will be. And we'd
like to be involved in web-api design so that there are ways for us to throttle
back the bandwidth/resources at critical times (e.g., the big June release and
the last week before EclipseCon). For example, the hypothetical Team-CVS
feature could utilize a reply code from the servers to throttle back how often
it checks for updates. Etc.
I've started a wiki page for comments: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse.Org_Usage_Patterns_Policy
- Bjorn
