How long page-IDs?
Should I have four characters or five, for the page IDs on this homepage?
- Four is a namespace of 194,481 permutations
- Five is a namespace of 4,084,101 permutations
I could have had four characters. I tried it for a while, but as soon as I was going to post a link to a big website, my stomach turned. What if I'll have to migrate to five in the future?
See, with four, I had only had about 12 collisions for my first 3,000 IDs. That's fine, it's no effort to renew so few duplicates. But the more IDs you generate, the more often you will get duplicates, as you exhaust the namespace.
We software people know the value of overprovisioning a namespace. Lessons from IPv4 and such fiascos. It's hard to predict how much you will need.
My rate of ID generation by <2024-Feb-19> was such that I expected to make no more than 20,000 IDs over my lifetime, but what if I decide to assign an ID to every subheading inside every page? Then it'd jump to perhaps 60,000. At that point, every third new ID will be a duplicate. And what if I decide something else crazy?
So.. five it is.