FreeLists / tn-bird / [TN-Bird] New software drives TN-Birds Archives

["Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>]

TN-Birders:  
The FreeList managers have installed new software to manage the archives of 
their system, including TN-Birds.  If you are a regular user of TN-Birds 
archives for searching records, etc. you may notice a faster system.  If you 
have not use it much or any this forwarded message may not be of interest to 
you.  Thanks to all of you who have so much good understanding as we go through 
the changes and have other technical issues, many of which we can not explain 
because we never know why they happen.

You may reach the archives at:  http://www.freelists.org/archives/tn-bird/

Let's go birding....

Wallace Coffey
Moderator TN-Birds Net
Tennessee Ornithological Society
Bristol, TN
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Hello FreeLists list owners, it's certainly been awhile, hasn't it?  No news 
is good news, right?

After years of using ht://Dig to maintain the search indexes for your 
archives, we've decided to move to a new product called Swish-e.  The reasons 
for this are many: 

- It's slow: indexing an archive (that is, building the search engine's 
databases) took too long.  As FreeLists has grown, the window of time needed 
to index everyone's archive went from "overnight, everynight" to "let it run 
all weekend" to "start it Friday night and it might be done by Wednesday."  
Obviously, this is not a scalable solution. :)

- Its indexes take a lot of disk space relative to other products.  Not that 
it's a particularly unmanageable amount of disk space in general, but 
searching those large indexes obviously takes longer than searching smaller 
ones.

- It's buggy: The last straw came last week when one of our list owners 
pointed us to a broken index for an archive that htdig apparently simply 
couldn't index correctly anymore.  'No excuse for that...

- It appears to not be actively developed: The version we were running was 
released in 2002, which is in and of itself a bad sign.  Worse, the new 
'beta' releases run many times more slowly than the version we're running -- 
we can't take steps backward. 

Swish-e appears to address all of these issues for us.  Its performance is 
excellent, its indexes are small yet effective, it provides us with more 
granular configuration, and as an added bonus, provides us with a nice search 
API, around which we've built our own search setup, rather than relying on 
what ships with the product. 

The new search engines are already in place and operational, so feel free to 
test yours out.  We're currenlty running a full re-index to catch any we may 
have missed.  If you run into problems with your archive's search engine, 
please let us know.

Thanks,
  John


PS: Sneak preview: Stay tuned for some exciting news early next month!


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         Moderator: Wallace Coffey, Bristol, TN
                 wallace@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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