Happy pre-April Fools (Mar 29 2007)

Oh, my head. So the database was choking all night. This morning Bob, Jeff, and I hashed out what could possibly have been causing this (especially as we thought we ameliorated this weeks ago). But we stuck to our policy of not trying to fix a soon-to-be-upgraded system.

So the action items were to bounce the whole project (including the database) and make easy adjustments of variables affecting innodb flushing behaviour - perhaps it will find the need to halt everything and flush to disk less often. The priority of making sidious the master database has suddenly bubbled up to the top. We'll try to do that in the coming (work) days.

For some reason on the server status page the upload/download server frequently, and erroneously, shows up as disabled. I can only think this is due to the many transient NFS problems we still see on kryten - the status process can't reach kryten's disks to see if a pid file exists or not. So for now, ignore it. We'll probably keep kryten up for another week or so as its traffic slooooowly reduces.

Jeff found a bug in the data recorder script - sometimes data was being duplicated at the end of one file and the beginning of the next one. We tracked this down and fixed it (needed more robust cleanup after child processes exit). No big deal, and it'll be easy to fix the splitters to work around this.

Other upcoming projects: Massive spring cleaning (getting rid of old junk, moving servers into and out of the closet, etc.). Recreating the RAID device holding all the workunits to free up some extra disks to use as global spares for the unit (may be a long planned outage at some point in the not-so-near future).

Three day weekend (due to the university's Spring Holiday). Par-TAY!

- Matt

____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

behaviour

behaviour

Oh Matt. You've gone to the dark side.

By the way, it seems like the minor adjustment didn't do very much. We're basically going to weather the current storm until we move to using sidious as the master next week. Hopefully that'll help.

- Matt
____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

behaviour

Oh Matt. You've gone to the dark side.