[linux-audio-user] web forums

[Larry Troxler]

On Sunday 18 January 2004 12:19, Joern Nettingsmeier wrote:
> Larry Troxler wrote:
> >>This is a questions of good indexing. Google is your friend.
> >
> > Speaking of mailing list archives, what happened to the good old days
> > where you could just FTP a massive tarball of the last years messages and
> > search through it on your own machine, using you own methods?
> >
> > It seems that for most mailing lists now, the only way to get at the
> > archives is through a browser or search engine that is run on the server.
> > Why is this? The information still has to be stored on the server,
> > regardless.
>
> the probable reason is that ftp downloads of full archives put quite a
> burden on the server, especially if someone has to pay per byte.
> consider how many thousands of online queries correspond to the
> bandwidth usage of just one full download.
>

Oh, duh! I'm sorry for missing the obvious reason - I guess you can tell that 
I've never hosted web space before, huh??

I guess the answer is for the mailing lists to cell CD's of archives.
I'd gladly pony up for such a thing.

> the webspace for the linux-audio-* archives is being donated by kai
> vehmanen, and my guess is his bandwidth too is limited.
>
> that said, if someone does want to conduct some very special research
> (such as indexing or statistical analyses of some kind that require
> full-text archive access), something can be worked out with kai - just
> drop him a note.
>

Nah, it was just a general note / question, not actually specific to the Linux 
audio list.

> as a sidenote, the LAU traffic totals at around 55 megs uncompressed so
> far (since its beginning in 2001), LAD traffic since 2002 is around 45
> megs, so the total is probably way over 100m.
>
> regards,
>
> jörn

That's all?? I actually thought it would be much more. Damn, then someone 
_does_ need to sell a CD filled with various mailing list archives, then.

BTW with broadband accesss, I would gladly dl 100 megs, to escape the hell of 
the online search engine. My error, of course, was in ignoring the sever's 
bandwidth cost in providing such a tarball.


Larry Troxler