Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 18:22:58 +0200 From: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de> To: shimon@simon-shapiro.org Cc: freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [PORTS] Pgaccess doesn't run on -current anymore, Update Message-ID: <19980420182258.61494@panke.de> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.980330115211.shimon@simon-shapiro.org>; from Simon Shapiro on Mon, Mar 30, 1998 at 11:52:11AM -0800 References: <19980330123130.39177@caramba.cs.tu-berlin.de> <XFMail.980330115211.shimon@simon-shapiro.org>
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On 1998-03-30 11:52:11 -0800, Simon Shapiro wrote: > > That was the hardware part. You must hire a database expert, a Web > > designer and a cgi script programmer. All people should be willing to > > work for at least 2-3 years on this project. This is not an easy task. > > Using your logic, we should close the FreeBSD project, as maintaining an > Operating system like this takes 200-300 kernel experts. FreeBSD has less than 10 kernel hackers. > In other words, if the FreeBSD project cannot find the people to do this, > then noone can. BTW, your time estimate is good ig you plan to e paid > hourly for it. I nuilt much, much more complex RDBMS based information > systems in fraction of that time. An email parser is no more than a week. > The text search about the same. My point was that building a RDBMS is only 10% of the job. The rest is support, bug fixes, support, support ... It is easy to find someone to fix/extend a perl script or c program. Finding an oracle expert is difficult. > > A full update of the thread database took 6 min on hub (Pentium Pro), > > thats 100MB/min ;-) An update for the last week took 3-6 seconds. > > Something is too good to be true here. How can you read Unix filesystems > at 100 Megabytes per second? I wrote minutes, not seconds. hub.freebsd.org is a busy Web/Mail/database server. The disk output for the mailing lists files is ~1.5MByte/s. This was tested with a simple find archive -type f| time xargs cat >/dev/null > Also, if the current engine is so great, how come all these people are > excited about replacing it? I have no opinion as my usage is too scarce > and too superficial to vioce any opinion. My position is that IF there is > a desire to build an RDBMS based engine, I will be happy to contribute my > modest knowledge in the matters and some of my time. The current engine is not great ;-/ The readers of freebsd-database are not the typical serach engine users. The current usage of the thread database is very low. My impression is that the average user don't want mail threads. There are ~2000 search requests and 3000 requests to read a mail (getmsg.cgi) per day. In an early version of the thread database there where only clickable Message-ID's and In-Reply-to links. Only 2-3% of the users followed the links. I changed the getmsg.cgi script and added a 'Next in thread' and 'Previous in thread' knob. The thread usage grow up to 12-14%. This is still low. Only every 8th user want to read the 'parent' mail or the replies. In other words, don't wast your time for mail threads until you got money or want sell the project. -- Wolfram Schneider <wosch@freebsd.org> http://www.freebsd.org/~wosch/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-database" in the body of the message
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