Andrew Sly wrote:
Recently, searches are taking longer at the PG site at times. A few days ago, in the evening when I tried a search, it said something like server overloaded and request to try again.
This is a good sign that more people are using PG.
Yes, this has been a good deal more common over the last few months.
According to Marcello, sometimes a cause of this can be people who use robots which request all 15,000+ bibliographic records from the catalog in quick succession.
Yes. If you access the site in the middle of a robot attack, the overload message is more probable. I try to kill off all robots that work during peak hours, but it's an uphill battle.
Apparantly also an issue was people linking to many of the images included in some of our html files, in such a way that when many people tried to view _their_ website, all the images would be requested from the main PG site.
That has been taken care of. You cannot inline PG images from third-party websites any more.
However, I do believe that normal, "single user downloading an ebook" activity is increasing as well.
According to Alexa, currently we are serving 0.002 % of all pages viewed on the internet. A year ago that was 0.001 %. We have more than doubled the pages we are serving. gutenberg.org is a top-5000 site now! See: http://www.gutenberg.org/internal/stats/alexa user: internal pass: books -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org