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Oct 31, 2003, 10:34pm

It would be cool if the local path feature allowed for a
'default' search path in addition to the specific per-world
mechanism it uses now.

Currently, you have to manually set up a directory tree that
contains the name of your domain server and any subfolders
you may need in the URL (mangled of course).

Then you need to populate that folder with another copy of
the megapath, or as I mentioned in another post, you can create
a shortcut to the same megapath from multiple places, but you
have to do this manually, and it's a little ugly for the average person
to figure out a pathname after the fact from a cache folder entry
and go set it all up. By then you've already wasted the bandwidth
anyway.

It would be useful if you could tell the feature to *always*
consult a specific folder on your local machine regardless of
the domain you were attempting to access, in addition to doing
what it does now (a per world mapping). This would allow
people to dump a copy of the megapath locally onto their hard
drives, and surf a great many worlds without having to download
a single 'stock' object.

Enabling this feature dramatically reduces bandwidth consumption
even if you just spend a lot of time working in your own world.

People who fiddle with stock objects without changing the names
shouldn't do that anyway :-)

Nov 1, 2003, 10:32am

I think running multipath on you files on IIS works....
]

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Nov 1, 2003, 11:23am

[View Quote] I don't see how it could be used to automatically supply
all megapath content for all worlds you visit without having
to manually edit the multipath script.

What I describe below is real easy for the non techie to
set up. It would just work out of the box with no extra
stuff to set up other than one copy of the megapath on
a locally accessable drive, and the AW installer or a new
browser feature could make that painless too.

Not only would doing this save a lot of bandwidth, it also
*could* mean that the cache directory you already have
would not need to store those redundant copies of all the
megapath models over and over again in each persons
world.

Assuming this was implemented, the browser could decide
that if it got a local copy of something, it didn't need to
put another version of it in the given worlds cache directory.

If you current cache did not have cached versions of any
of the megapath stuff in any of the directories, how much
filesystem space and bandwidth would you save?

Multiply it by the number of universes you might visit.

Multiply it by the number of visitors to your world.

It could add up.

If I was paying AW's OP path bill... installation of a local
tarball of default objects would be mandatory before
you ever came in the door. By design... it would cut the
monthly bandwidth for all AW megapath driven worlds
by... ummm.. gee.. let's see... carry the four... add the
six... 100%! (assuming they sent you everything and
neglecting the initial download)

If it was done really nicely, they could send you big chunks
as you need them. Go into a 'standard' world, and a dialog
says "Would you like to add the MARS content to your local
hard drive for faster loading?".

If a set of stock objects was mandatory, world owners could
have much smaller FTP spaces with only the models they have
that are unique on them. This could make it cheaper and more
accessable to people to have their own OP path, and they
would certainly be easier to manage without the megapath on
them.

It takes a gnarly server to deal with the entire megapath anyway.
You probably have enough room for it all, but you will probably
hit a limit on the number of files you may have, and Apache
is sorely stressed in dealing with directories that have many
many thousands of files in them as well.

It just seems like something that would make a huge difference,
would not take AW much effort to implement (90% of the
mechanism is already there), and it would save both AW and
all their customers a whack of real money in bandwidth costs.

Plus it would make everyones browsers go much faster.

What's the downside to this one again?

>
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Nov 1, 2003, 2:23pm

[View Quote] Why would IIS be your first choice? Right, I forgot, nevermind.

--
--Bowen--
http://bowen.homelinux.com
Give me ideas.

Nov 1, 2003, 5:16pm

So why did you ask...?

- Mark

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