Re: Improving gweather

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Fri, 2003-03-07 at 11:36, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
> 
> > I'd tend to suggest that we point the applet at an URL we control (say
> > weather.gnome.org) and have it expect the XML format.
> 
> > In any case if we have the applet looking at an URL/format we control we
> > can always fix it.
> 
> It also means that we (and when I say "we" I mean "GNOME's kind web hosting
> sponsor, Red Hat") have to fork out the bandwidth fees... Might be an
> interesting way to find out how many users we have, though. ;-)

I suspect that an extra level of indirection:

 The weather applet connects to the server and asks for an URL 
 to connect to when started. 

 All future attempts go to the redirected URL for some period
 of time (or until failure)

Would be useful to give us flexibility in the future. 
Remember, the code we ship now will be in use for _years_.

I'm not _too_ worried about bandwidth as long as the weather
applet isn't on the panel by default and has a sane update
period by default and prevents the user from setting an 
insane period. (I want weather updates once a second!)

 100,000 users reading 1k every 15 minutes 

is about 900kbit which won't kill gnome.org, though it would
hurt. (We will likely be switching to a flat 10mbit sometime 
soon. Right now we have access to 10mbit but pay expensive 
rates if it goes over 2mbit.)

But if we had redirection we could start simple, and then
if we do get 100,000 people with the weather applet on their
panel, we can easily deal with the problem.

Regards,
                                       Owen