[Haskell-cafe] Re: torrent for 6.8.1?

[Ian Lynagh]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 05:52:08AM -0500, Cale Gibbard wrote:
> On 04/11/2007, Alex Tarkovsky <alextarkovsky at gmail.com> wrote:
> > brad clawsie wrote:
> > > do torrents exist for 6.8.1? my experience is that people will use
> > > torrents if they are offered and they really do lift the pressure from
> > > the origin domain (haskell.org)
> >
> > Er, you want to torrent a 7 MB file? ;) That would be a waste of effort
> > and resources server-side, and a minor hassle client-side. Plus the file
> > is so small it won't shave any significant load off the server,
> > especially when nobody will bother to seed it. I'm sure most *nix users
> > get GHC from their distribution's mirrors anyhow. Mirrors are really
> > what you need. ;)
> 
> Anyway, it seems like haskell.org is becoming
> more responsive now, but it would be something to keep in mind for the
> future.

I have no evidence, but I'm pretty sure that the responsivity problems
are nothing to do with the GHC download page or people downloading the
release, but rather with people looking at pages on the Haskell wiki
(perhaps by following the http://www.haskell.org/ or
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel link in the ANNOUNCE).

We have had problems 3 or 4 times in the last few months where lots of
people have gone to one of the wiki pages (e.g. due to a story link from
programming.reddit.com, or even just a reddit comment linking there).
These pages are all dynamically generated, and do things like increment
a visitor in a database, which makes apache very unresponsive. We can
patch it by redirecting the appropriate page to a static copy, but
that's a pain because SSH is also quite unresponsive, we don't currently
have an easy way to discover which page is causing the problems, and
because I have to stop whatever I'm doing and deal with it immediately.

It would be much better if someone could fix the wiki to not fall apart
in these circumstances, rather than just fixing the symptom (people
can't download GHC when the site is unresponsive).


Thanks
Ian