[vorbis-dev] I've pulled the plug on viewcvs

[Ralph Giles]

On Saturday, March 22, 2003, at 10:27 am, Linus Walleij wrote:

> Ugh. Probably robots running havoc. Do you have a robots.txt file in 
> the
> root forbidding access to the web CVS interface? Another thing that'd
> help is the FastCGI module I believe (that's apache I presume).
> Sourceforge successfully runs it for a quadrillion projects without
> dying so there must be a way of getting this to work properly.

It looks like someone was spidering viewcvs around then. It's true we 
don't have a robots.txt (not entirely by accident--it can be useful to 
have the code in search engines) but the address has no reverse dns and 
it was issuing ~5 cgi requests a second, so a robots entry may or may 
not have helped.

> Actually I find WebCVS useful from time to time, although not vital, as
> you say. The most obvious use is for linking in "README" and 
> "ChangeLog"
> files (or similar) to web pages so they always display the current 
> state
> of the project. It isn't used in the Xiph.org anyway...

I find it quite useful as well. It's often more efficient for checking 
change history than mucking about with commandline cvs, and it remains 
the only way to determine what modules are available. The cvsroot 
backup tarball option is nice too. Can we try re-enabling it with a 
robots.txt entry?

Unfortunately I don't know any way to limit the cgi process aside from 
nice-ing the whole webserver. OTOH, perhaps that's also a reasonable 
solution if we consider mail, cvs access and whatever 'other work' 
monty was doing more important the serving web pages.

  -r

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