[OAI-general] question about using the Va Tech provider

[will.sexton@duke.edu]

I'm working on establishing OAI provider services, starting with a
metadata set related to a particular project.  We're using the Va Tech
"VTOAI OAI-PMH2 PERL Implementation", running on a Solaris machine, under
Apache server cgi.  The data set is derived from several sources; we've
worked to convert it all into flat XML files.

We have, I believe, about 16k records.  When using the repository explorer
at http://oai.dlib.vt.edu to test our setup with smaller data sets (up to
1k records) it works fine.  However, in recent days I've transferred up
about 10k records for testing, and now we're finding that we're getting
time-out errors.

I've spoken with someone in the past who implemented the Va Tech
implementation using FastCGI in Apache, and they said they had good
results with it.  But I was working with our sysadmin today to set this
up, and we've been getting 500 (internal server) errors when we test;
mainly, I think, because we're not completely sure about how to wrap the
oai.pl process in FastCGI.

I know that the author of the Va Tech implementation is on this list, as
well as others who seem to have a fair amount of experience with OAI
implementations.  So I'm seeking some advice.  Is the Va Tech
implementation, plus or minus FastCGI, sufficiently robust to handle a
repository of 15k+ XML-file records?  If so, and we need to use FastCGI,
can someone offer some guidance on using them together?  And if not,
should we consider another provider framework, and which one?

Thanks in advance...

Will

--
Will Sexton / Metadata Architect * Research & Content Development
Perkins Library * Duke University / http://www.duke.edu/~wsexton/