[Foundation-l] dumps

[Anthony]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/2/24 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> > On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> >> It may in fact be much more user friendly to
> >> simply offer an enormous text file for download because users don't
> >> have to unpack it.
> >
> >
> > Another point, which I forgot to mention.  If you have the bandwidth to
> kill
> > and just want an enormous uncompressed text file, why not just
> screen-scrape
> > everything?
>
> Because that involves the servers' CPUs as well as bandwidth.


What's the average ratio of CPU-seconds to download seconds for an article?
Surely a single machine could handle thousands of simultaneous
screen-scrapers doing this 24/7.  I don't buy it.