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Subject: Re: Multi file source
Author: pitiful joantang
Date: 11/07/2002 13:09
 
>     I think the ability to mirror from multiple sources 
is 
> very much a useful and needed feature. As far as using 
the 
> right tool for the right job, what if you need to mirror 
a 
> slow site with very rare content (in my case the old 
> ftp.be.com site)? The information would not be found on 
> edonkey or any other p2p tool for that matter, and 
> downloading hundreds of small files is tedious at best. 
> 
> Bradley Barnes


Understandably, everyone think highly of feature they 
happen to need it or they think they need it. But to me, 
the more important thing to know is how useful the feature 
is, and how many users can be meaningfully benefited from 
the feature, and hence it determines if it is worth the 
programming effort needed. For site with very rare content, 
realistically u don't expect to find more than 1 source 
anyways. And even suppose u do find several alternative 
mirrors, then there are likely to be one or more that serve 
faster.. then use the faster one. If you are so unlucky, 
all are REALLY slow, u won't get much faster with multiple 
source... 

The most common websites that do have mirrors are usually 
those software download sites, which is naturally huge, 
even among them, i dont think they are all "synchronised" 
at exactly the same time, and hence, they are not 
exactly "mirror". 

In short, u need to realise that among the websites that 
*YOU* downloads, how many among them are really that 
unbearably slow, and out of that, how many of them have 
alternative mirrors, and out of even that, how many of them 
are so large that it takes hours/days to download... i 
honestly believe u don't find a handful easily...

Obviously i think this feature cannot be meaningfully used 
in vast majority of cases... so should not waste effort for 
small number of exceptional cases then... and also u need 
to consider if the two sources websites are *exactly* 
identical, file-wise or structure-wise, if not so, how to 
handle it in httrack? etc...  And the coding required for 
this feature is not trivial!!!


Joantang - dont use new ID ^^
 
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Re: Multi file source

11/07/2002 11:19
Re: Multi file source

11/07/2002 13:09




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