This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: blog archives and resources Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Well, I tried commenting on this item over on Gordon's blog, but it's giving me a 500 - probably related to the problem Gordon says he's having:

I got an IM from the admin at my hosting provider telling me there are about 30 concurrent mzscheme processes running and that it's consuming about 80% of the server's resources. Looks like the optimization problems I blogged about a while back have caught up to me. The general plan is to switch to a real storage mechanism, such as mysql, postgressql or dbm, instead of the filesystem, but I may try to hack in a temporary fix until I can get the time to do the right thing. In the meantime, I've done the really brutal fix and deleted the older half of the archives until I can get the performance under control.

Ok, I'm curious. I use the filesystem for storage on my blog as well, but I don't have problems like that. It may be because I only ever run one process - a single Smalltalk image - to manage all the blogs on the server. As well, I don't store html pages in the html directory system; all the "pages" in my archives are in binary object files (one per day). It's easy to route to the right file via the guid (which is a stringified timestamp). I use a cache for the keyword and category searches, which has helped a lot. I've thought about using a database, but thus far there's been no compelling reason to do so. Heck, even backups are simple - a tar gzip and I'm done :)