[Axiom-developer] RE: MathAction again unaccessible...

[Bill Page]

Martin,

On October 17, 2005 10:44 AM you wrote:
> 
> Bill Page writes:
>  > Martin,
>  > 
>  > I have the server running again, now in a mode that lets me
>  > monitor more closely what's happening. 
> 
> Thank you!
>

I have confirmed that unfortunately it was the use of htmlTidy
that was causing the problem. :( Apparently a small memory leak
that eventually crashes Zope after htmlTidy has been called many
times. So I disabled htmlTidy for general pages on MathAction and
only call it for pages containing MathML since I still can't
avoid the use of htmlTidy in that case. I don't think this should
cause any more problems, but I will continue to look for other
solutions.
 
> I saw, you looked already at tex4ht + jsMath. This would be
> a wonderful combination, it seems to me.

I agree.

> If you want, I put a post on comp.text.tex, maybe somebody has
> the time to do it quickly?

Yes, I think you should do this - if for no other reason than
to continue your philosophy of exposing Axiom to a wider audience
as you explained in a earlier email. And if we are lucky, you
are right that we just might find someone to do it quickly. :)

> 
>  > What do you find "strange" about the usage statistics?
> 
> Well, the peaks Oct 14 (downloads) and 15 (pages) were somewhat
> surprising. 34801293 kBytes on one day do seem a bit much. That's
> 33 GigaByte... Maybe they had problems with the download.

If this occurs again, I will send an email to the network admin at
the Keldysh Institute and ask if they can trace the access. If
someone is having problems downloading Axiom, I would like to be
able to help.

> 
> Pages seem to be due to ul.warwick.net. Seems to be a soccer club.

??? My preliminary investigations suggests instead that this url
belongs to an ISP in the New Jersey area of U.S.A.

http://www.warwick.net/

(probably a gateway or firewall address). The large number access
could be from one or more of their subscribers.

> 
> But since you have a good explanation of the crashes, I'm not
> worried anymore. (I only find it strange)
> 

I agree that these are probably legitimate access to our web
site, provided of course that this doesn't happen too frequently.
The Internet is a wild place these days and you never know what
someone "out there" might do. This type of access for example
might represent someone running a spider to take a snapshot of
the entire website. I think we have to be tolerant, so long as
such use doesn't seriously impact other users.

Actually, I am hoping that some of this new activity on
MathAction might be due to your recent post to comp.lang.lisp.
In spite of the two odd cases you mention, this might still be
the case since people often seem shy about posting to a newsgroup
or sending an email but they will click on a web link and take
a good look around web site with much less hesitation.

Regards,
Bill Page.