CERN Eric Thomas <ERIC@CEARN>
Wed, 30 Mar 88 00:38:00 GVA
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To all the postmasters who have quickly helped to clean up the LISTS database:
THANK YOU! And a boo to the few ones who still have 3 test lists in the global
index :-) Over 150 lists have been removed in less than 2 days, which was far
above my expectations. The present status of the database is: 60 reported 1.5n
nodes, 793 lists totalling 21257 header records which eat up 1718 kilobytes of
DASD space (2k-blocks disk - this info might be useful for sites which plan to
host the database). I think there may still be some 50-100 entries whihc ought
not to be there any more, but the rest are "real" lists. I'm pretty sure we
will reach 1000 once all 110 servers are running 1.5n. That's not going to
make it easy to search through the LIST GLOBAL output though. By the way,
massive database searches (like SELECT FUN IN LISTS) take an impressive amount
of time due to the amount of small files which have to be opened, read and
closed. If you want to read a 2-blocks file, you have to read 3 blocks from
the disk. Doubling the minidisk blksize would let you get the same info in 1
read operation (--> file depth 0), but then you would eat up more disk space.
I'll try to benchmark that tomorrow and decide what the optimal blocksize is
(but then we only have 3350s here).
The automatic peers chain verification and the global list registration are
forcing us to behave properly and work "cleanly" when defining lists. This may
be seen as a major pain in the whatever for now, because we have to pay for 2
years of little kludges here and there. But once the present status has been
cleaned up, it won't take much more time to set up lists properly and we'll be
actually glad to be informed when we've done something wrong. Please be
patient - it's only a piece of software, and software tends to be pretty dense
when it comes to it :-) All in all, the installation of this (first?) BITNET
globally maintained distributed database didn't go too bad - I had been
dreaming of loops and of every server asking every other server for a daily
refresh of its list info, etc :-) If this keeps working as it does now, we can
think of other such distributed databases, like a user directory service or a
list of filelist/files, etc.
Eric
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