Mathworld surrenders

[GP2]

mersenne40.txt and mersenne40.zip currently unavailable

Due to extremely high demand for the file containing the decimal digits of the new Mersenne prime, this file is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience, and encourage readers to check back at a later time.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/20...ersenne40.html

If they couldn't handle the bandwidth, there's no way we could have.

I'd seriously suggest never making a decimal-digit-expansion available again for any new Mersenne prime.

Most people probably click on the link and just sit there while it downloads the whole thing... and then never scroll past the first few pages (or the first page, period).

If they want to look up how many times their phone number or Social Security number or other number sequence occurs within the decimal-digit expansion, we might create a CGI interface for that. But even that might overtax resources in terms of CPU time, even if you precompute all the answers for sequences of N digits or less.

[GP2]

If we ever make a decimal-digit expansion of a Mersenne prime available again, it should only be in BitTorrent form.

For those of you unfamiliar with that application, it's a P2P program where clients download a file not only from the server, but download discontinuous pieces of the file from each other, greatly reducing the load on the server. It's a way of handling massive downloading of files, especially suitable when there's a sudden high demand.

BitTorrent is a relatively new thing, most people haven't heard of it or used it. Perhaps by the time the next prime is found, that will no longer be the case.

[ColdFury]

Keep the decimal expansions, just don't post the link in a prominent place.

[I_like_tomatoes]

Put a note beside the link that mentions that it will take a while to load.

[TauCeti]

Originally posted by GP2

I'd seriously suggest never making a decimal-digit-expansion available again for any new Mersenne prime.

Or perhaps only include the first and the last 10.000 decimals in the file. That would still give the impression of "huge".

And then Torrent the whole file like you suggested and/or make it available on mersenne.org only some weeks after the discovery.

[Jorgen]

Are there any ways of calculating the number in javascript in a reasonable amount of time? In that case we could just send over the exponent along with the javascrip-program and let each client do the expansion themself.

[GP2]

Originally posted by I_like_tomatoes
Put a note beside the link that mentions that it will take a while to load.

That's not the problem.

When a lot of users are trying to download the same large file at the same time, two undesirable things happen:

1) The entire website slows down, sometimes to the point of rendering it unusable. It's a data traffic jam.

2) It costs the website owner money. For most low-volume websites, the website owner gets a certain quota of data transfer that's covered by a fixed monthly fee... but if heavy downloading causes that quota to be exceeded, the website operator has to pay for every extra gigabyte.

[ewmayer]

Why not just provide users with a link to a simple software utility (hopefully no more than a few kB in size) that allows them generate the decimal printout on their own computer?

[Quacky]

I would really like to have aprogram that can also print out the current exponent im working on if I punch it in.
I want to see what a 10mil looks like !

[Xyzzy]

http://www.apfloat.org/apfloat/mprintc5.zip

Takes 7 seconds on a 2.67GHz P4...

C:\Documents and Settings\Mike\Desktop>ls -l 20996011.*
-rwx------    1 Mike     None      6320432 Dec  5 11:15 20996011.txt
-rwx------    1 Mike     None      2965894 Dec  5 11:15 20996011.txt.gz
-rwx------    1 Mike     None      2722533 Dec  5 11:15 20996011.txt.bz2

[Merlin]

Instead of the decimal digit expansion, provide only the binary digit expansion in zipped form. Zip can compress a long string of '1's quite efficiently.