No Subject

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

Dear GNOME fans,

We (as in "the people who maintain the anoncvs mirrors") are having big
problems with the anoncvs mirrors. The load average on Phil's server is at
70. The server I help run at CUC is now refusing telnet connections
because I turned anoncvs back on. Mandrake's server is at load average
180, with over 200 people using it at the moment. Other mirrors are out of
date or dead. To make matters worse, the gnome.org DNS maintainer hasn't
responded to DNS update requests to add a new server.

As you can see, anoncvs is in a very sorry state.

I think anoncvs is a nice idea for letting people get up-to-date sources
when they need them, but cvs consumes major system resources. If, like I,
you would like to see anoncvs continue, here are some of the steps you can
take:
	1. Volunteer to host a server. You need to be on a fast
	connection (T1-ish) and a machine with at least 600M of disk space
	dedicated to anoncvs. The speed of the machine is not vitally
	important, because as long as we get enough people to volunteer
	in this manner, the load will be distributed across these slower
	machines.

	2. Get more RAM for the people who already have servers.
	I stopped running CVS on my personal machine because it
	was interfering with my GNOME development. Phil has been
	having to endure a machine that takes a few seconds to display
	every character he types into an IRC session. Having more RAM
	is the single most important thing to speeding up CVS.

Where every single anoncvs user can help:
	3. Smart updating.
		(a) Do not update your whole tree with one command.
		    Update each module individual and sequentially,
		    so that the server side process does not take 25M of
		    RAM. It will be slightly slower than doing one big
		    upgrade, but definitely faster than having no
		    anoncvs and waiting for tarball releases.
		    
		(b) Do not update too frequently. The rule that I would
		    request people follow is to update once a day at most.
		    If you encounter bugs during your daily build and
		    would like to get fixes for them, please make sure
		    by reading your cvs-commits-list mail that someone has
		    committed a fix for the problem before trying a second
		    update. Do not put your update script into crontab
		    either. Run it when you need it.
	   The importance of these points will only increase as GNOME
	   becomes more popular, and the demand for anoncvs service
	   increases.

Spread this message to everyone who might ever have inhaled the air that
an anoncvs mirror used. :)

Your help is needed to create a usable anoncvs mirror network. Please
pitch in to make it happen.
-- Elliot
"In film you will find four basic story lines. Man versus man, man
 versus nature, nature versus nature, and dog versus vampire."
    - Steven Spielberg