Date   : Wed, 13 Aug 2003 22:45:50 +0100
From   : Jon Ripley <beeb@...>
Subject: Re: Over 150,000 hits to the BBC Micro Mailing List Archive

In message <3F3A964F.4060408@...> you wrote:

> Jon Ripley wrote:
> 
> > Last month alone, when the list went public, there were over 75,000
> > hits. Bringing the total so far to what I believe is over 150,000 hits
> > from browsers the world over. The web server that hosts the archive is
> > doing not much else other than serving the archive.
> 
> That would be me reading most of it :(

You're not the only person to say that :)

> > I'm not sure if all this is a good or a bad thing but I must say that I
> > never expected this level of interest.
> 
> What sort of data transfer is that in terms of bandwidth?

Last month about 260 megabytes. Averaging 8 megabytes a day with a
maximum of 40 megabytes for an average of 2500 hits a day peaking at
14,500 hits. So not much of what's available really.

> Does the server do the archiving automatically or is it done manually? 
> There was an occasion a few weeks ago where I wanted to find something 
> I'd deleted from trash but  it wasn't up on the archive server.

The server just hosts the list. The archive is updated manually once a
month. Once all the posts for a month have come I grab the complete
month of posts, add them to the promordial sources and completely
regenerate the entire archive before reuploading the whole thing and
deleting the old copy. The whole process takes less than two hours and
requires the minimum of human intervention.

Regenerating and replacing the entire archive takes a lot less time than
just generating the last month and uploading the difference.

> Thanks again for your efforts Jon, I'm sure everyone else here will echo
> my appreciation.

It's all just a silly idea I had one day.

Have fun,
Jon R.
-- 
http://www.stryker.freeserve.co.uk/ Quality RISC OS Software
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