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Re: [LUG] Anyone fancy helping?



On Wednesday 24 Sep 2003 11:27 pm, Neil Stone wrote:
> Neil Williams wrote:
>
> In for a penny.. in for a pound... I have a few spare machines here...
> frobably the friendliest sysadmin i know... (me)

:-))

> Any ideas how much space might be needed initially ? I can always get a
> new hdd should the need arise...

Initially, the HTML and other content is tiny - it'll fit on a floppy. The 
MySQL database will gradually build with time. I'm trying to improve the 
efficiency (currently about 20/hr added, 24/7 via cron) but as to how large 
it gets, that's down to your own configuration of the scripts and the 
popularity of the site. I'm currently estimating a database of at least 5,000 
records before the site could become self-sustaining. That is a real 
shot-in-the-dark estimate though - pick a number and double it stuff. It 
could easily be more than double that before the number of failed searches 
becomes 'acceptable'.

34,000 records of an old style (larger record size) database took up 49MB just 
for the MySQL data. I'm hoping that the new database structure will be 50% of 
the size of the equivalent old style, so 8MB/10,000 records. Not large, but 
then it's hard to tell just how big the database will need to be. Perhaps 
10,000 is a wildly low estimate. Maybe 250,000 would be needed - that's about 
the most I can envisage on any one server. Certainly my first active site, 
isbn.org.uk is setup with a 250MB account. Before it gets anywhere near that 
I'll have some kind of distributed export and synchronisation protocol for 
these servers. A bit like GnuPG keyservers, ISBN's are never deleted or 
re-assigned or reused. Even if a book is out of print, the ISBN is still 
valid because the book will be available second-hand somewhere and there are 
already online sites that will attempt to find these books. So the database 
needs to be distributed and probably needs to co-opt an ever larger array of 
servers.

It's v.v.v.early days and it's hard to see that far ahead. If the project is 
to meet the eventual target of all ISBN's there'll need to be quite a few of 
these servers! (Anyone like to hazard guess of how many ISBN's might be out 
there? The people who issue ISBN's don't know! (or even care, probably).)
How many new books are published each year? Anyone know? (Not how many books 
are sold, how many new titles or new editions?)


-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.codehelp.co.uk/
http://www.dclug.org.uk/
http://www.isbn.org.uk/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/

http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3

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