Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 30 Mar 1998 17:33:58 +0200
From:      Wolfram Schneider <wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de>
To:        John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>, nik@iii.co.uk
Cc:        shimon@simon-shapiro.org, Wolfram Schneider <wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de>, freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG, andreas@klemm.gtn.com, scrappy@hub.org, Satoshi Asami <asami@FreeBSD.ORG>, Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>
Subject:   Re: Mailing list search interface
Message-ID:  <19980330173358.57866@caramba.cs.tu-berlin.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980330091604.485T-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>; from John Fieber on Mon, Mar 30, 1998 at 09:48:45AM -0500
References:  <19980330110200.17368@iii.co.uk> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980330091604.485T-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 1998-03-30 09:48:45 -0500, John Fieber wrote:
> > I mentioned MHonArc to Jordan, and his first response was 
> > 
> > > Eeek!  The evil MHonArc resurfaces! ;-)
> > >
> > > It doesn't scale at all well - just try MHonArc'ing a really big mailing
> > > list archive.  You soon get a set of monster html files that are
> > > essentially unusable - I know, I did the short-lived "FreeBSD Docs"
> > > CD for awhile using MHonArc.
> 
> Listen to the man!  He knows what he is talking about...well, in
> this case at least.  :)

Agreed.


> Though I have no first-hand proof, knowing how Glimpse works, I
> suspect searches will generate quite a bit more disk I/O on the
> server than freeWAIS.

There is a technical report about glimpse, 10 pages. I
strongly recommend to read this paper before using glimpse
in real word applications!
ftp://ftp.cs.arizona.edu/glimpse/glimpse.ps.Z

Basically, glimpse does a linear full text search like grep. Searching
400MB E-Mails will take twice the time (for CPU *and* disk I/O) 
as seaching in 200MB. Glimpse does not scale by design. 
In best case glimpse is 256 x faster than grep, in worst
case it is slow as grep.


> And on and on...  I think it is time to add an FAQ entry on why
> we don't use hypermail or MHonArc for the mailing list archives. 

;-)

-- 
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



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19980330173358.57866>