h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You can't put an arbitery value on h2g2, although I often wonder how much h2g2 costs and where it is. I imagine a few humming servers in the basement of Broadcasting House, someone should write an entry on h2g2!!!

Why has the conversation search been disabled?

I was wondering that myself... I'd guess because this place is too huge. I know it never worked that efficiently before.

I know it's the amsters wot keep the wheels spinin but it's the ferrets wot run around 'ferretin fings out' and he's tired see.

If you're interested in the technical glitches that happen on site. Then it's worthwhile subscribing to Jim Lynn's journal (U6). From time to time he candidly talks about all manner of things that are going on behind the scenes. And writes about it so well to boot

rough guess at the size of hootoo...

Considering entries and postings are stored as ascii text (or something similar) they don't take up much space...
Approx 12 million postings at an average of 1kb each is 12 Gigabytes

(As an example - the following is 393 bytes long...

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;


And as a worse-case scenario - take them to be an average of 5kb each, you can fit all the conversations on a 60 GB disk

Entries - if you take those to be around 10kb each on average, the complete edited guide would only be 8000 x 10 kb = 80 Megabytes...


Unedited entries...

This is more difficult

If we take the info page... the last entry created in hootoo was A5827421

I don't think that every single number is used, and not all of them are used by hootoo (other sites personal spaces etc...

Assume 1 in 10 is actually used then you get a total number of entries - including edited entries and personal spaces of approximately 580,000.

Call them 10 k apiece and you get a total of about 6 GB of entries


So...

60 GB - Conversations
06 GB - Entries

And add another 400MB for the DNA software (which is a total guess!)

I'd guess the whole thing could fit on an 80GB hard drive


Anyone think I'm miles out?

Well... sounds plausible... makes my pool guess of 189 meg look rather puny though...

Ok... I'm taking two guesses.... either 189 Mb or 189 Gb.

If I'm going to be inaccurate, I want to be wildly inaccurate.

my guess (42GB) might be a wee bit small but I think it's still a pretty good guess
Nerd42

42 gigabytes might not be too far off...

I suspect I erred on the high side all the way through those calculations.

Rightly so... There's all those blobs to consider as well. They're not very big as far as file size goes, but they do take up more space than ascii text and guide ML code.

I wonder how likely it is that h2g2 fits between my two guesses. I think I've got the upper and lower limits but... we could be greatly surprised.

You've got to remember that a lot of the postings nowadays are not hootoo posting, they are messageboard postings.

Of the messageboards, by far and away the biggest is the 606 football board. They've been on DNA since the 27th July, and in that time they've racked up nearly 2million postings.

hey wait a minute ... do the images count?

maybe there might not be a way of seperating h2g2 from the other DNA sites so we'll never know ...
Nerd42

But the question, GD, was not 'How big is DNA?', it was 'How big is h2g2?'

I'm sure there's a way to get a good estimate...

Some Italic I'm sure can roll a chair over to the server, pull up a file manager, find the h2g2 folders, add up their sizes, try not to forget any odd corners of h2g2, try also not to include too much of non h2g2 DNA space, get a sum and VIOLA!!! HIMALAYAS!!!

When Jim stuck it all on a laptop, DNA was h2g2. It was before any of the significant sub-sites were launched.

Now that the messageboards have been launched on the platform, I doubt whether one will ever be able to disentangle it without seriously twiddling around underneath the bonnet.

It depends on how it's organised on the server... if it's got folders by section, it might not be very hard... if all posts are in one big folder... forget about it!

I'm sure the italics have read this and are just teasing us. Power corrupts...

How's it go... Power corrupts, Total Power Totally RULES!

no you are thinking of the Golden Rule:

"Whoever Has the Gold Makes the Rules."
Nerd42