Before anyone pesters me about it, yes, I know, the gentoo-perl articles section on my site are out of date. Its that way on purpose. Sort of.
The scripts I had generating those pages did their job, albeit a bit slowly. I had them cron’d to run on the sun box around 3 am, a nice early time where I’m either not awake still, or getting ready to hit the road for work and don’t care if the mail server’s a bit bogged.
Then one morning I sat down at the laptop to do something (I think I was checking in on a bug report of all things) when the cron job kicked off. I think the closest analogy to the sound it generated on that hard drive was the concept of a horde of locusts attempting to claw their way out of an old metal trash can. Yes, it was that bad, and no, I don’t think the drive is in any danger yet. But when I began thinking about what I was doing, I realized the flaw of my ways.
I really do like DBD::SQLite an awful lot – it’s (generally) fast, lite, portable, everything you want out of an RDBMS without the hassle of actually running one. But there’s no real buffer management that I can see, no way to handle a few hundred thousand changes to the database in a minute without thrashing around on your cylinders. So for now I’ve pulled the plug on the generators. I might just see if I can tweak out how I’m utilizing DBD::SQLite better, but I’m also considering abusing some of that mysql space that pair gives me with my shell account and just thrash out their hard drives 🙂