Greetings,
I recently used wget in such a way that the result disagreed with my
understanding of what should have happened. This came about during a
small programming exercise I am currently working on; I am attempting
to
see if a large number of domains (from '-D' option) would be processed
more quickly by using the hashtable included in hash.c. While
comparing
the speed of my hashed implementation of host checking against an
unmodified version of wget, the standard wget did not seem to respect
my
list of accepted domains.
For the hash table version, I did the following:
In recur.c, I init a hashtable with all of the accepted domains from
opt.domain. Ignoring (for the moment) increased memory usage, I
assumed
that this would surely be faster than the current method of checking
the
url's host.
However, when performing the check inside host.c's accept_domain
function, I realized that I would need to parse u->host to get just
the
domain component. This involves some overhead that may make hashing
not
worth it. Also, during this entire operation, I am assuming that if it
would provide any significant improvement, it would have most likely
been done before my decision to try it out. Nonetheless, I've enjoyed
playing around with it.
My first couple tests were against my own website, using a list over
5000 domains. Both wget and wget-modified downloaded the same files,
and
at roughly the same speed. My website is so small, that I wanted
something larger, but not so large that it would take more than a fre
minutes. I know going around and mirroring random sites is perhaps not
recommended behaviour (without a delay), but it worked.
I bring this up for one my two questions. Can someone recommend a
better
method of performance testing?
Having found my target website, I went ahead and ran the two wget
versions, one after the other. When mine came out to be almost twice
as
fast, I knew to assume that something was amiss. Sure enough, wget has
downloaded much more content.. and spanned to many more domains.
This is the command I ran for each:
<pathToVersion>/src/wget -rH -D $(cat trash/text.txt)
williamstallings.com
Excusing the useless use of cat, text.txt contains the massive
comma-separated list of domains.
Each of those domains is a randomly generated numeric value, expect
for
the final one: williamstallings.com
Previously, whenever I ran this test against a (smaller) website, both
versions of wget would only recursively download those specified by my
single "real" domain in the list. However, this time (and I did it
twice
to make sure) original wget went on to download from over 20 other
domains.
I would appreciate it if someone could explain what is going on here.
Seeing as this behaviour exists with the version I obtained from
git://git.savannah.gnu.org/wget.git as well as wget from the package
manager, I am not proclaiming "found a bug!". I imagine that I just
misunderstand what should have taken place, since I expected to only
have the single directory from williamstallings.com
Thanks,
Evan Krell