DATABASE is  a standard facility of  all 1.5m servers. You  cannot assume
that  all lists  have  archives of  course;  but a  list  that does  have
archives has searchable ones. All  servers have a BITEARN database, which
eats a lot of  CPU on the first search every month  because the index has
to  be rebuilt  from the  new  MNF. The  postmaster may  have decided  to
disable the  database functions permanently,  or temporarily in  cases of
intensive CPU  load. In that case  all search requests will  be rejected,
but I guess this could happen on a SPIRES server too.
 
SPIRES is probably  faster than LSVDBS, but... It takes  about 3 secs CPU
on a 4381-11  (=4341-12) to perform a "worst case"  search on the BITEARN
database (I mean the actual search time).  It takes about 3.5 secs CPU to
analyse the  incoming job file,  pre-parse this "worst case"  command (in
REXX), and prepare the output (say 30-40 lines). If the output is larger,
the ratio  becomes much worse  of course. Since  SPIRES also relies  on a
server for passing commands to it and returning the output, you might win
on the 3 secs of search time but  I doubt you'll win much on the 3.5 secs
of 'extra  processing', or then  you'd be  using a simple  interface that
doesn't support internet mail or something like that. In any case, SPIRES
is likely  to be maybe twice  faster but not  10 times. And it  will work
only at  BITNIC (plus maybe a  few other nodes). Two  sites have recently
installed LISTSERV just  for the database search  functions, because they
were not  rich enough to  get themselves a full-fledged  database system,
and they  haven't complained about CPU  use (nor would I  have composed a
kind reply if they had - "you get what you pay for, okay?" :-) ).
 
  Eric