[Tdwg-guid] Throttling searches

[Chuck Miller]

Sally,
I don't think it's a problem.  GBIF/DIGIR currently enables providers to
limit the size of query responses.  It's not impolite to impose limits
on a public query interface. Without a limit, your provider service
could become overloaded and inaccessible to everyone.  So making
tradeoffs like this should be understandable and acceptable to all.

The fallback for the query user would be to contact the provider
directly and make a special request.  Making the provider contact
information more visible might help in enabling a fallback for this
tradeoff.

Chuck

-----Original Message-----
From: Sally Hinchcliffe [mailto:S.Hinchcliffe at kew.org] 
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 6:08 AM
To: tdwg-guid at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: [Tdwg-guid] Throttling searches

Hi all
another question that has come up here. 

As discussed at the meeting, we're thinking of providing a complete 
download of all IPNI LSIDs plus a label (name and author, probably) 
which will be available as an annually produced download

Most people will play nice and just resolve one or two LSIDs as 
required, but by providing a complete list, we're making it very easy 
for someone to write a crawler that hits every LSID in turn and 
basically brings our server to its knees

Anybody know of a good way of enforcing more polite behaviour? We can 
make the download only available under a data supply agreement that 
includes a clause limiting hit rates, or we could limit by IP address 
(but this would ultimately block out services like Rod's simple 
resolver). I beleive Google's spell checker uses a key which has to 
be passed in as part of the query - obviously we can't do that with 
LSIDs

Any thoughts? Anyone think this is a problem? 

Sally
*** Sally Hinchcliffe
*** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
*** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708
*** S.Hinchcliffe at rbgkew.org.uk


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