Boost Asset Stewardship Review - Some questions received
The following questions were sent to me about the assets that the C++ Alliance already manages. My replies are included: 1. What are these alternate domains, and how do they differ from boost.io ? These are domains that the C++ Alliance provided for us when we had that issue where boost.org was down for a long period of time. At the time I wasn't sure we would even get boost.org back or what the timeline for recovery would be. I thought that we should provide a backup domain that users can be directed to until the issue is resolved. The C++ Alliance offered to help and registered boostlibraries.org and boostcpp.org that point to our website hosting. boost.io is the domain for people to preview the new website that the C++ Alliance built, developed by Fastly with content contributions from Boost users and developers. 2. Why do we need to pay to support downloads if the hosting is free? The storage costs are minimal but the bandwidth is not. At one point Boost downloads approached 60TB per month and Bintray couldn't afford to support us for free. JFrog generously offered to take over. Recently, our downloads started approaching almost 200TB per month, and now even JFrog couldn't afford to keep hosting us for free. They suggested we use a CDN to reduce traffic costs. I reached out to multiple providers to get a good deal. The best rate was from Fastly but this was also too expensive. The C++ Alliance offered to handle these costs and we subscribed to Fastly. Sam Darwin administers our Fastly account. For the list discussion, you can start at: https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2024/01/255654.php Glen
The storage costs are minimal but the bandwidth is not. At one point Boost downloads approached 60TB per month and Bintray couldn't afford to support us for free. JFrog generously offered to take over. Recently, our downloads started approaching almost 200TB per month, and now even JFrog couldn't afford to keep hosting us for free. They suggested we use a CDN to reduce traffic costs. I reached out to multiple providers to get a good deal. The best rate was from Fastly but this was also too expensive. The C++ Alliance offered to handle these costs and we subscribed to Fastly. Sam Darwin administers our Fastly account.
Isn't that a contradiction to the Boost-is-in-decline narrative?
El 09/09/2024 a las 17:48, Hans Dembinski via Boost escribió:
The storage costs are minimal but the bandwidth is not. At one point Boost downloads approached 60TB per month and Bintray couldn't afford to support us for free. JFrog generously offered to take over. Recently, our downloads started approaching almost 200TB per month, and now even JFrog couldn't afford to keep hosting us for free. They suggested we use a CDN to reduce traffic costs. I reached out to multiple providers to get a good deal. The best rate was from Fastly but this was also too expensive. The C++ Alliance offered to handle these costs and we subscribed to Fastly. Sam Darwin administers our Fastly account.
Isn't that a contradiction to the Boost-is-in-decline narrative?
My understanding is that this bandwidth increase is due to some new non-C++ language packages depending on Boost, not because we have 3x C++ developers downloading boost. Best, Ion
On Mon, Sep 9, 2024 at 8:48 AM Hans Dembinski via Boost
Isn't that a contradiction to the Boost-is-in-decline narrative?
Well, no. More downloads could mean more people are using Boost, which is a good thing. Yet more downloads does not translate into new volunteers. Boost needs to gain new volunteers at a rate equal to or greater than the rate which existing volunteers depart (for whatever reason) to remain viable over time. Thanks
On Mon, Sep 9, 2024 at 11:48 AM Hans wrote:
Recently, our downloads started approaching almost 200TB per month, and now even JFrog couldn't afford to keep hosting us for free.
Isn't that a contradiction to the Boost-is-in-decline narrative?
Different people measure this in different ways. Some others are: - The number of new libraries proposed - The amount of traffic on the mailing list. - That the current website looks like it was designed for NCSA Mosaic I think around ten years ago there was a presentation about how Boost was dying because AFIO still wasn't accepted into Boost. Glen
participants (4)
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Glen Fernandes -
hans.dembinski＠gmail.com -
Ion Gaztañaga -
Vinnie Falco