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In the event that there is new Mersenne Prime related traffic, what should we do to prepare?

Here is one (trivial) suggestion:

Take the link to prime6.txt off the front page of mersenne.org. I once clicked on it and accidentally downloaded that large file when I expected to be seeing gee whiz facts about the size of it.

It might be a better idea to split prime6.txt into a few sections (10 or 11 or so) - people can view the first, marvel at how long it is and how it's only a small part of the number etc, and then most won't view the others.

That would probably end up saving a significant amount of bandwidth without inconveniencing people much.

I think we should set up a Bittorrent for it... We did this for the last one (After the fact!) and it worked pretty well...

This forum has one free day of bandwidth a month so we could also link it to this server for the first day... I could then use a HTML redirect to forward it to wherever...

Or, we could code a small Windows app (like mprint) to print the number so all people have to do is download a small binary...

Maybe have a "warning" text specifying how big the file is as part of the link text? Or a javascript:confirm() in order to downoad it?

Unless already enabled, turn on gzip compression. And store a gzip-compressed version as prime7.txt.gz so the web server doesn't have to compress it each time.
See [url]http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/content-negotiation.html[/url] for example.

Another option could be a two-stage rocket: the first link points to a page with the first few thousand digits and at the bottom of that page there is a link to the real text file. This is like the suggestion from I_like_tomatoes, but I think people might be interested in just downloading the file without having to copy/paste themselves.

The Bittorrent bit is good, might also throw in edonkey and other large networks in the mix when we're at it.

What about a Java version of Mprint? :geek: