[bksvol-discuss] Re: storage space for Bookshare
- From: "Dan Beaver" <dbeaver888@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 16:34:37 -0400
Hi all,
As an old database person let me drop my 2 cents in here.
The location of the servers makes extremely little difference at all. Pretty
much the only difference location makes is that the further away from a given
user the servers are then responses from the server will seem a tiny bit slower.
Extremely generic searches where the results can be very large lists stress
database engines due to the amount of resources it takes for the engine to
process them. If Evan, E and I were to request a list that would return most
of the books in the collection then whomever was first would get first crack at
those resources. The others would have to wait longer and anyone else using
the sight requesting info via the database would also have to wait until those
long requests completed.
Now, with computers which can do several things at the same time this is not as
much of a problem. However, even with multitasking systems the database is
still limited on how much it can do in a given amount of time.
Another issue here is the database being used. I have no idea what database
tool Bookshare is using but some of the databases are much slower than others
and process data requests in a much more single threaded manner than others.
I believe
that it is not really our business which servers and databases Bookshare is
using. Bookshare has the responsibility to provide the services they promise
and to do it as efficiently as they can. They have responsibility to manage
the funding they have and to spend it on the best they can within the limits
they have. In order to do this they have to balance funding against costs of
server space and resources, responsiveness of the web site, service to how many
users, etc.
Personally, I believe they do an admirable job delivering exactly what they
promise. They have not promised to deliver entire lists of authors or books
either for that matter.
I might suggest here a way they could deliver the entire list of authors and
books. This method would cost Bookshare little in way of space, server
processing or database resources.
Bookshare could develop a process that would execute nightly at midnight
perhaps. This process would execute a request to list all the authors or a
request to list all books in the collection. These lists could be written to a
given place on the server. It would only be as fresh as once every 24 hours.
They could then develop a web page where we could go to and download these
lists. They could be plain text or .csv or .xls files. Even if all of us
downloaded these files it would put little stress on the servers. Once we
download them we could use other tools to search the lists on our own systems.
As I indicated before this is simply my attempt at explaining things so
everyone can understand. I suggest the possible solution only as a suggestion.
Bookshare engineering may come up with their own method of meeting this need.
I sincerely hope this helps someone/everyone understand how these things work.
Thanks.
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