When I start grumpily thinking of ways to punish a program's badbehavior is about when it sinks in that I don't like it. Which meansthat Google Desktop has a problem.

Back in December I wrote about Google Desktop and conditional GET and concluded that I didn't have enoughevidence to really know what the heck was going on. Well, I have severalmonths more data and more people using Google Desktop against me, andI've reached a conclusion: Google Desktop doesn't do

Since I alluded to it in passing in an earlier entry , I might as well describe what I know about how THEMIS set up their systems to handle theload. (Disclaimer: this is second and third hand.)

To cope with the visitors to their regular web site, THEMISput their ordinary web servers behind eight Squid proxies , which were in turn behind a load balancerbox. This apparently held up very well to the quite a few millions ofextra visitors from Google Mars .The main movie page was on

Today's random optimization thought, brought to my mind by the processof trying to make DWiki run slightly faster:

If you can't make it faster, maybe you can call it less.

Caches are the degenerate brute force case of this, but programrestructuring is better. Repeatedly calling the same core routine canbe a sign that the upstream interfaces aren't really doing what higherlevels want, so the higher levels have to do redundant work.

Besides, if you can figure out a way to call