[Clipart] Searching and download graphics (3)

[Alan]

Thank you.

Which of your suggestions would be the most efficient and the easiest to
update and maintain?

Alan

Greg Bulmash wrote:
> Alan,
>
> You don't gain any significant efficiency by grepping text files over 
> storing the same information within a database.  As well, the search 
> utility offered on the OCAL site was primarily text based.  Though 
> they would sometimes display a PNG, more often than not it was just text.
>
> Additionally, the server load to serve a 50k .gif is the same as to 
> serve a 50k text file.  Graphics, unless being dynamically generated, 
> only eat up bandwidth in the pipe, but don't really tax the server. 
> It's the database queries and script processing that are the problem.
>
> The ways to gain efficiencies there are to pre-make the output of 
> certain popular database queries and update them periodically (such as 
> a tag cloud that updates every 6 hours instead of updating live), or 
> offloading some of the search effort to the client (via a Flash app 
> that downloads an XML file and builds its own search index from it) or 
> a third party (such as Google).
>
> - Greg
>