Congrats! [ and some problems :) ]

[Raj Dutt <hostmaster@voxel.net>]

******    message to minivend-users from Raj Dutt <hostmaster@voxel.net>     ******

Hello fellow minivend users,

Over the past week or two, we've been getting a fairly big cd/video shop
(about
350,000 titles) on the web.

As it stands right now, we've got minivend 3.11 installed on what is
basically a
stock Red Hat 5.1 Pentium 200 / 64M server.

Things are running pretty well, and overall we're pretty impressed with
Minivend. There are however, a few nagging problems that we can't seem
to
resolve.

Since we've got search a large catalog, search time is a problem. We
went from a
flat products.asc file to a glimpse database. This has improved things
dramatically. Now, search results take between 5 and 10 seconds to come
up. I've
heard from reading archives of this list that glimpse is generally the
fastest.
Mike also commented that generally page build time is much longer than
search
time. Is this the case even with a catalog this size? (incidentally, the
database is only 5 fields : code, price, artist, title and type). We
really want
to get the search/display time down to < 1 second, any suggestions on
the best
route to take?

On the topic of searches, searches with the character "'" don't seem to
work too
well - a fatal error message is displayed almost immediately. I had a
peek at
the Glimpse.pm file, and it seems that it removed all of these
characters .. but
it doesn't seem to. I think it would be best if it replaced the ' with a
. as
this seems to be the equivalent of a wildcard. My perl is sketchy at
best, are
there any easy solutions to this?

Lastly, every once in a while minivend just dies for no apparent reason
- and
there is no error message in the error.log (either in the catalog
directory or
the minivend directory). It just seems to hang (the process is still
listed).
I'm thinking it _could_ be memory problems, and am going to upgrade the
server
from 64M to 128M (currently minivend takes up about 10M of memory
constantly and
very little CPU). I doubt this is the problem because there is normally
several
megabytes of memory free and about 100M of swap. A possible clue here is
there
seems to be more than one or two catalogs running when minivend hangs.

Once again, so far things have gone pretty well. Many thanks to Mike and
all
others involved in the development proccess. Minivend bears testimony to
the
advantages and quality of Free software.

Best Regards,
	Raj Dutt
	Voxel Dot Net, Inc

PS : The site in question is at http://www.duffelbag.com : Buy a CD!


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