[Savannah-hackers] Re: What's up?

[Nic]

Nic said:
> Maybe we can just NFS map some space in?

Mathieu replied: 
> According to my experience, NFS does not really fit for server with
> got many many accesses, we will surely experience new problem not
> trivial to fix. 
> I think that getting an harddisk would be something easier.

Maybe it would. But I think NFS would work if we could partition the
CVS directories into 2 or 3. That's what takes up the space.

But a disc would be better.


Nic said:
> It is a problem with the current code base. Our scalability plan is
> ever bigger machines. That is obviously a bad scalability plan.


Mathieu replied:
> That's not our plan. I proposed several months ago to host the
> database on one computer, the PHP interface on one other computer and
> the CVS on another one. It would separate stuff that use most of the
> CPU (https, anoncvs). 
> 
> But since it do not seems to be possible, the other option is to
> change the computer.
> 
> But personally it would not be a problem to me if we get a new box
> only for PHP/database and let the CVS on this one. I think this
> computer should able to handle CVS easily.

I absolutely agree: that is the right architecture for savannah. If
we could partition the cvsroot directory then we'd have a CVS
repository that could be scaled across many machines. Just using the
first letter of a project name as a hash key would be enough: that
would give us massive scalability compared to today.


> The RSS stuff is indeed a good addition. And you're right, any
> enhancement that can save admin time is a good thing. But what takes
> more time is the review of the pending projects, and it requires some
> experience, despite the fact that we wrote a savannah.el that reduce
> per 10 the time it require to do that job.

Yes. This is what takes the time. I think there's a clear separation
between people who are dealing with technical issues with the
savannah environment (ie: support requests, bugs, sysadmin issues)
and people who are moderating new projects. 

The moderators need to be the sort of people you describe above:
people with some time dedicated to doing it.

IMHO the admins (people who are responding to support requests,
etc...) don't need to be people with lots of time. We just need to
co-ordinate well.


Nic