<A><B>April 14, 2005 - 21:00 UTC</B>

<A><B>from: Technical News </B>[/url]

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.

<A><B>April 14, 2005 - 21:00 UTC</B>

<A><B>from: Technical News </B>[/url]

<B>http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/tech_news.php</B>








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