[mapserver-users] One MapServer-Site more...

[Puneet Kishor]

Steve,

Actually I believe letting Mapserver do garbage collection would be a very
good thing. It would not tax the program or the computer one bit, would
centralize these temp files (by requiring and instructing the user to do
so), and would make things simpler. Yes, Cron is an elegant way of doing
things, but not everyone knows how to set up a crontab. It is an additional
step, and is not even available on Windoze unless someone runs a bat file
via an at command.

Anyway, garbage collection is just one of the ways of making the program
simpler to install and setup. More on that in another email...

pk/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Lime [mailto:steve.lime at dnr.state.mn.us]
> Sent: Monday, December 24, 2001 9:51 AM
> To: woodbri at swoodbridge.com; mschulz at webgis.de
> Cc: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
> Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] One MapServer-Site more...
> 
> 
> While I imagine mapserver *could* do garbage collection I 
> think that's probably a
> waste of it's time and would be better handled by cron. 
> Alternatively you can always
> design applications that require no temporary files at all.
> 
> Steve
> 
> Stephen Lime
> Data & Applications Manager
> 
> Minnesota DNR
> 500 Lafayette Road
> St. Paul, MN 55155
> 651-297-2937
> 
> >>> Stephen Woodbridge <woodbri at swoodbridge.com> 12/21/01 07:17AM >>>
> Michael Schulz - GIS Bearbeiter wrote:
> 
> > Yes, this was a no-space-left-problem on our domain. But 
> perhaps someone
> > can give a hint howto delete the temporary files, without having the
> > possibility to install cron-jobs or similiar things because the ISP
> > doesn't offer this option. Perhaps it could be done via 
> php, e.g. each
> > time the init-page gets loaded old temp files are deleted. Hmm, has
> > anybody done something similar?
> 
> phplib has a similar garbage collection problem and they generate a
> random number, if it is less than X then it does the garbage 
> collection.
> This allows you to tune how often garbage collection happens so every
> hit isn't trying to do it. (ie. if 0 < random <= 1 and X= 0.1 then
> roughly 1 in 10 hits will do garbage collection).
> 
> Steve Lime: It would be nice if this feature were added to 
> mapserv such
> that you could set the percentage and the age in sec/minutes/hours of
> the files to be deleted and have mapserver do the garbage 
> collection. If
> percentage == 0.0 of undefined then no GC is done like now.
> 
> -Steve
>