Hello Cale, Sunday, November 4, 2007, 1:52:08 PM, you wrote:

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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. ;)

1. there are many windows users 2. afaiu the situation, official unix packages becomes available much later than user-compiled ones

The binaries are ~47MiB apiece. I suspect that almost everyone on Windows and Linux x86 will want the binaries too, since compiling GHC tends to take a while. Anyway, it seems like haskell.org is becoming more responsive now, but it would be something to keep in mind for the future.

and don't forget that haskell.org box serves not only ghc downloading and even not only haskell site i propose: in a few first days after release, make available only alternative download places (SoundForge, BitTorrent...) and then, when first wave of downloads shrinks, make direct links. also, hackage server may be a better place for storing such popular downloads? -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 05:52:08AM -0500, Cale Gibbard wrote:

On 04/11/2007, Alex Tarkovsky wrote:

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brad clawsie wrote:

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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

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:

Hello brad,

Sunday, November 4, 2007, 6:00:27 AM, you wrote:

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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)

or we can use SourceForge where GHC project still exists. just now it's impossible to got to haskell site probably due to its huge load

What the...? Oh, there's a new version of GHC out. I didn't know that! :-) [Kinda explains why I noticed all the library documentation changed the other day...] Well, the Haskell.org homepage seems responsive enough from where I'm sitting. (Maybe my ISP has cached it or something...)