in reply to Re: Technique Efficiancy
in thread Technique Efficiancy

Before you do this, ask yourself why.

This scheme is substantially more complex than just hitting the database. There are more files. If you ever need to reproduce the installation, it is not always obvious where to get them from. With things scattered around it will take longer for people to learn the system.

Plus you have all sorts of possible synchronization errors. For instance you change where the files are dumped, but somewhere you still have a reference to an old location that appears to work because the file is there...then a month later you delete that and have to figure out how it ever worked. Or you lose a cron and then find out a couple of months later what it was for. Or someone decides to refresh a file with a long-running daemon which doesn't survive a reboot 6 months later.

In short there are a lot of possible failure modes. Most of them won't happen to you, and they won't happen often. But why let them happen at all?

That said, this can work and there are good reasons to go with a design like that. Certainly if I needed to run a high-performance website, I would look to something like that to offload work to static content that can be readily distributed across a cluster. But I wouldn't choose to make my life more complex up front when I had a choice.

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Re: Re (tilly) 2: Technique Efficiancy
by little (Curate) on Apr 22, 2001 at 01:05 UTC
    good point,
    I did it already this way once because we where producing HTML and PDF files. And to be honest I did it in this way because I wanted to do so. I wanted to try it, if it works and I made a nice frontend to it for the administration. But I "spread" the files because I don't want anyone to edit a document when all his changes would be overwritten with the next update of the content.
    Ok, the lost cronjob is a very strong concern, but are there anything alike "triggers" on a unix machine to invoke an action or script - like you have in some highly advanced RDBMS ???
    So that is why I would prefer to keep those files in separate places. Ok, another reason is that automtically updated files will/might irritate the readers of cvs logs.

    Have a nice day
    All decision is left to your taste