- Feb 5, 2001
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January 12, 2006 - 18:30 UTC
We quickly wrapped up another database compression/backup this morning. It only took two hours as the database is now at its minimum size given our current operational status. Some extra time was spent rebooting the database server to change a BIOS setting (that was causing harmless but annoying messages to clog the server logs).
We started early as we were hoping there were batteries arriving to replace dead ones in one of our UPS'es, but they didn't show up this morning. Had they been here we would have shuffled some UPS'es around during this outage. Maybe next time. At any rate, since we are nice and trim and all caught up we shall go back to weekly Wednesday outages for database compression/backup.
It should be noted we are currently processing 1.2 million results a day, which is far above our original hopes of being able to process 1 million results a day. But apparently our servers are pushing their limits, and certain events can trigger a month-long back-end malaise. Future SETI@home applications will have workunits that take longer to process, which will help. We also hope to acquire newer replacement hardware as well at some point. Like a database replica server so we wouldn't need these weekly outages.
The main part of the master database merge is done. We are now planning the shape and scope of the outage for the final part of the merge. Unlike what was stated in the previous tech news item, it may take longer than a day to do this - we want to make this a "partial" outage (during which users can still upload/download work) so it will take some careful planning to minimize any "full" outage time.
In other fun news: We finally got around to adjusting Classic credit for users that showed obvious signs of cheating. In Classic, it was very easy to cheat the system to get credit without doing any actual work. We ended up partially or entirely removing credit for about 900 of the top 10000 users (all of which had about 20000 or more credits). Below that there wasn't enough data to show obvious signs of rampant cheating (not to mention enough time and disk space to run the checks on the remaining several million users). These adjusted credits should be sync'ed up with the BOINC databases soon if not already. Case closed.
This among other things means TeAm Enterprise jumped to #62.
While the top-200-team-stats haven't been updated, the actual team-stats have. Meaning, the final stats are:
#1: 24.336.008: Lost 61.782: OcUK - Overclockers UK
#2: 22.602.537: Lost 1.958.223: SETI.Germany
#3: 19.873.567: Lost 116.675: Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop
#4: 14.598.335: Lost nothing: TeAm AnandTech
#5: 14.508.591: Lost 5.179.373: SETI@Netherlands
#6: 14.151.915: Lost 93.324: BroadbandReports.com Team Starfire
#7: 11.318.470: Lost nothing: Hewlett-Packard.
#8: 9.716.894: Lost 1.229.680: Forum Hardware.FR Team
#9: 9.125019: Lost: 13.642: Team Art Bell
#10: 8.600.670: Lost: 1.788.716: SETI@China
#11: 7.347.460: Lost: 15.399: The Knights Who Say Ni!
#12: 7.211.153: Lost: 445.632: SETI@klamm.de