Re: mountable face servers?
Marc VanHeyningen (mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu)
Fri, 09 Dec 1994 14:21:31 -0500
> Steve Kilbane writes:
> > Are there sites that provide this [indiana Faces]
> > database in mountable form? This isn't an
> > ideal solution, since I imagine it doesn't help bandwidth to have lookups
> > occur every 30 seconds or so from hundreds of sites, but a a cacheing
> > server would be nice....
>
> It is probably most horrible, but what about the following...
> Make a faces db accessable via a WWW (http) server, preferably
> you send it the email address, and it returns the bitmap (pixmap?).
I've thought about doing this, and it would be pretty easy to implement.
However, it does have some serious scaling problems; if a nontrivial number
of people start hitting our server every time they read a mail message,
things could break down, which has sort of dissuaded me from encouraging
this sort of approach.
- Marc