How many volunteers is too many?

[Scott Jensen]

Just curious. Is there an upper limit right now on how many volunteers DF can currently handle? Let's say that the Heavens smile down on DF and "60 Minutes" does a segment on it that causes a flood of volunteers. Can DF be flooded? Have steps been taken to scale up the project if such a windfall were to happen? Is there at least a plan for such a continguency? Or would the "excess" volunteers be turned away or have to wait for new servers to arrive?

[Brian the Fist]

Are you from 60 minutes by any chance :D ? At present, the server is very underloaded. It is difficult to make a precise prediction but we believe we could easily handle a five-fold, or even ten-fold increase from what we have now (say 25k-50k users). However, we are indeed (as I speak) making further changes to allow the project to scale to 100K users and beyond. Not certain when these changes will be done but not too long from now we hope. This is part of the reason why so far, we have only advertized the project through word of mouth.

Now that we are doing bigger sample sizes and bigger proteins, (and most bugs are quashed), we hope to start recruiting more users to join the effort in the near future.

[Scott Jensen]

First, sorry, I'm not from "60 Minutes".

Second, nice to hear you've thought of this and realizing it will need to be always thought of.

Third, since you're about to raise the curtain on this project, I'd like to hear what marketing plans you have worked up. I'll start up another thread ("Marketing DF") for that issue.