Re: [hylafax-users] Submitting large number of faxes requires hugeamounts of disk space

[Joe Phillips <jaiger@acm.org>]

On Tue, 2003-02-11 at 01:43, John Wythe @ Work wrote:
> I am having a problem with disk space usage when submitting 
> a large number of faxes.  
...
> Submitting 1000 faxes would require 28G of disk space.

Ouch!

> Is there any way to have Hylafax hold off generating the 
> doc???.ps file until the fax is about to be sent?

Currently, AFAIK, it cannot be done.  I believe PS generation is done on
the client side, prior to queing the job to the server.  This is the
case for ASCII text anyways, maybe PDF is handled differently.  The best
you can do is hold off queueing the jobs until the modem is almost
ready.

In order to implement such functionality you would have to:

1- decide what constitutes "about to be sent".  Is it 1s, 1min, 1hr or
1day before the modem comes ready?

2- have a guaranteed-time PS converter.  for example, if for #1 you said
"1min before modem comes ready" can you guarantee that any arbitrary
document (say your 28M document) can be generated in under 1 minute? 
Further, for transmission, the server needs to convert to TIFF.  Can
your 28Mb document be rendered to TIFF in under a minute?

You could resolve this by building a streaming converter.  Then only a
page would need to be converted/rendered before transmission.

If you don't have a guaranteed-time converter, and say you overrun the
modem-ready point now you're not using your modems effectively.


Maybe you can get your file sizes down by using TIFF natively?  There's
got to be a maximum filesize for a single TIFF page, particularly at FAX
resolutions.  Something tells me it can be under 28M.

-joe


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