Re: (Entire) Site validation

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, David Dorward wrote:

> On 20 Apr 2004, at 15:32, Martin Salo wrote:
> > What do you think about an idea to develop a validator that validates 
> > whole sites, not only pages. It could search for links in pages and 
> > when a link is in the same domain (a subsection of the page) it 
> > validates it. It should be limited (to about 200 pages or so) to avoid 
> > abuse.
> 
> Such a validator already exists, 
> <http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/>, although its limit is 50 
> pages (a fact which, last week, led me to finally getting around to 
> setting up the w3c validator locally).

I just raised the limit to 100 pages.  (We recently moved to a new host
with cheaper bandwidth, so I was planning on raising the limit soon.)

> I have some concerns about the load this would cause on the w3c server; 
> it has a rather higher profile then the WDG. What is the load 
> (bandwidth / CPU) like at present (assuming there are no issues with 
> making that information public)?

The load depends a lot on the server that handles it.  On our old,
underpowered server, we had trouble with badly-behaved robots overloading
the server with too many CGI requests (sometimes involving the Validator,
but often other parts of the site as well).

I've changed the limit on number of pages a few times in the past, but the 
reason for lowering the limit was always to compensate for the extra 
bandwidth needed to handle Microsoft mass-mailing worms at our mail 
server.

-- 
Liam Quinn

Received on Tuesday, 20 April 2004 14:35:42 UTC