[sword-devel] module modtime -vs- CLucene index out-of-date-ness

[Kahunapule Michael Johnson]

Chris Little wrote:
> Unfortunately, that's impractical. With a virus scanner on, the 
> compression takes 5 minutes for a single Bible (OT+NT) on my Win32 
> system (2GHz Pent-M, 7200RPM drive), due to the constant disk access. We 
> would either have to tell users to disable virus protection or deal with 
> people complaining that their systems freeze every time they add/update 
> a module.
>   
Hmmm... maybe instead of indexing instantly in the foreground, launching
a restartable background process that works on creating indexes for all
installed modules while the main program is actually running would work?
The index would be used by the main program if it was marked as
completed, otherwise it would fall back to slower, but still functional,
searches. Of course, this would have the advantage that the system
wouldn't take excessive amounts of time to install a module, but the
disadvantage that performance would be seriously suboptimal until the
indexing was done.

Telling people to disable virus protection is not a good idea, in
general. If people get used to doing that for legitimate programs,
crackers could just as easily ask people to disable virus protection
while they install their malware... and probably get some people to do it.

In the case of a really long process, paying attention to entertaining
the user with estimated completion times and indication of activity
makes it much more likely that the process will be allowed to complete.
5 minutes per Bible is pushing the average user's attention span, but if
they know they have time to go to lunch, or watch a whole season of
"24," or whatever the estimate says, they might...

Or, you could go back to your idea of just pre-indexing the modules and
living with the bigger downloads. Bigger downloads don't bother me this
month, living in Colorado with a high speed Internet connection. Next
month, they will, as I'll be living in Papua New Guinea with a slow
connection that I pay by the megabyte for. We can overcome that problem,
however, by periodically having someone mail a CD or DVD with all of the
current Crosswire software and modules on it. We'll most likely keep
doing that with either larger or smaller modules, so it actually isn't
that big of a consideration.

Michael