• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

SETI@home/BOINC technical news.

R

Rattledagger

Elite Member
April 14, 2005 - 21:00 UTC
Another general update here from BOINC server land:

Several users have been complaining that the third party stats pages are falling behind, i.e. reflecting current values less and less. Here's why: these stats pages use data snapshots which we take every 24 hours on our replica database server. Most queries are made on the master database, but the stats dumps are too huge and I/O intensive. So to protect the master we run these dumps on the replica.

Well, since we've been busy purging old results from the master database, the replica has been unable to keep up. Reminder: the replica currently runs on a much slower machine than the master, and has a hard time staying current (every update on the master also has to happen on the replica). Under normal conditions the replica stays fairly up to date, only falling a few minutes behind at peak times.

Anyway, since we've been purging rows from the master database, this means the replica also has an excess of extra updates, and has fallen as much as 4 days behind. This has become unacceptable, obviously, so for the time being we're going to run the stats data dumps on the master. This should reduce the gap noted above. Please note that this backlog only affected the reporting of the stats, not the actual stats themselves.

In other news, we had a short, unannounced outage yesterday to test a new UPS management card. It worked. We still have some significant server reorganization to deal with before implementing it, but this card will better ensure graceful shutdowns in the event of a random power failure. In the meantime, all the important servers are protected, just not in the most ideal/elegant manner.
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by: BadThad
Originally posted by: JWMiddleton
Thanks RD!

Great stuff, but just make Seti Classic go away!! NOW!!
Click to expand...

Indeed....before BBR gains anymore or lures someone with 100k wu's!
Click to expand...

At least freeze the Stats engine like Nascar holds the positions when bringing out the Yellow flag.
 
The purging has nothing to do with cheaters.

Every wu and every result takes up a little bit of space in the BOINC database. The more results & wu, the more space is used, and the database will also start using longer and longer time as the size increases.

Since the "canonical result" for validated wu is copied to the Master Science Database, any "done" wu isn't really neccessary any longer. So to save on space and speed-up database again, db_purge was programmed, and this archieves db-state to file and afterwards deletes the records from the BOINC database.

In BOINC, all "results" assigned to a user can be looked at, so users can check if any errors and so on. To allow this, seti@home is normally waiting 7 days from wu "done" till it is purged. But, after the new db-server was installed in February, db_purge wasn't started again before last week, so much more results than normally have now been purged in a short time.

The credit is saved to other databases, so the only you loses is the opportunity to look on all results you've done.
 
Does this update on the BOINC servers also affect other BOINC projects like Einstein@Home or is this one only for SETI? 'Cause the Einstein@Home 3rd party stats have a hard time recently withdaily updates, sometimes they fall as far as 3 days behind.
 
All BOINC-projects uses their own set of servers, and chooses their own settings of how often to run db_purge and generating stats-files and so on.

AFAIK Einstein@home have run db_purge atleast daily since last year, not sure on how long wait-time before purge.
LHC@home is mostly out of work, but they're also purging fairly frequently.
Predictor@home haven't purged for some time now, but announced 14.04.2005 they will start purging everything older than 6 weeks.

As for CPDN, all results seems to still show up.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top