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From: bajan@cs.mcgill.ca (Alan Emtage)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXTStep interface to McGill's Archie?
Message-ID: <1991Mar11.232046.14729@cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 11 Mar 91 23:20:46 GMT
References: <1991Mar7.011758.17135@math.ucla.edu> <1991Mar10.115801.18135@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu>
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In article <1991Mar10.115801.18135@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse) writes:
>
>I suspect you don't really have much idea how huge a database it's
>searching.  I'm sure it's over 10Mb and think it's pushing 100Mb.
>(Confirmation, Alan?)  And there are typically ten to fifteen of them
>running at once.  Ten minutes doesn't surprise me a bit....

Actually the file to be searched is about 15Mb (the whole database is
about 70Mb). The new version of archie due out "any time now" does most
of its work in core as opposed to the current version which is stuck on
the disk most of the time. Consequently it is faster and should degrade
more gracefully under load since we're now using a shared memory model.
And yes, during the week we usually have between 10 - 18 archie processes
running: we are averaging over 570 logins/day. This doesn't include the
mail interface work. Quiche is a very busy machine.

I doubt at this point that a faster search algorithm would make much
difference. The only thing that would make a major difference now would
be a different database structure, which I'm looking into. If anybody
knows of a structure for storing strings in which regular expression
searches can be done more efficently than a flat file, I'd like to hear
about it.


-Alan

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Alan Emtage,                    "Ashore it's wine, women and song;
McGill University,CANADA         Abord it's rum, bum and concertina"
					-19th Century British Naval Saying

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