Hello, folks - just getting over a really really bad cold. I rarely ever get sick like this so it's a bummer when I do. Anyway, I'm back, though still only about 80-90%.

In the meantime, nothing much happened except the happy mixture of (a) enough download bandwidth to ensure an even flow of work, (b) a consistently long average workunit turnaround time, and (c) no unexpected other stresses, allowed us to finally, albeit slowly, catch up on the assimilator queue over the past week. At first I thought our queues were benefiting from the new splitter which might have been generating less noisy workunits (and therefore less prone to quick overflow and return), but the opposite was true: the new splitter was generating annoying broken workunits that errored out immediately. Sorry about that. In any case we're still in dire need of database server improvements, mostly in the RAID re-configuration realm. We're also getting smartd errors more and more - these drives are approaching retirement already. Can you believe it?

- Matt (sniff cough)

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

< Thanks for the Posting Matt . . .

< Eric may have mentioned the "donation processing script is offline" situation eh?

. . . know exactly what you mean Sir! kicked mi butt for about 2 1/2 weeks - ended up in the ER - all is better now for me and glad you're feeling better too

> Stay well Sir and take it easy for the next couple of days (that's what i was told by the Doctor's at the ER) ;)

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

On a whim, I bought some of that Emergence-C from Costco. Wow! I think it really works as I have been exposed to, but have not contracted several nasty colds this winter within my family. It probably has to do with the stuff being dissolved in water, rather in pill form. Don't know.

The only thing better for colds I've experienced was in Dublin. I had just crossed the Atlantic sitting next to a terribly ill English sales person who was actually trying to sell me something for 6h's. Sure enough, I get to Dublin, drive to work the next day, felt my head filling up and spinning with it's own precession. So I head to a chemist, who sold me a horse sized Vitamin-C pill (I don't actually remember what it was, except that it contained C and some other stuff), went back to the bed/breakfast, ordered a proper Guiness pint in my room, crashed on the bed, and woke the next day felling kicking good.

Ok, "too much information".

Thanks for the update Matt. Stay well and have a good day/night.

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Good to see you back in the land of the living Matt. Hope you make a full recovery soon.

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Welcome back. Just been there myself and it took ten days to really get over, so take it easy.

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.....In the meantime, nothing much happened except the happy mixture of (a) enough download bandwidth to ensure an even flow of work, (b) a consistently long average workunit turnaround time, and (c) no unexpected other stresses, allowed us to finally, albeit slowly, catch up on the assimilator queue over the past week.....

- Matt (sniff cough)

I was wondering whether you'd deliberately planned a steady stream of long-running work to let the assimilators catch up, or whether it was just the luck of the draw. Sounds like serendipity wins out this time, but I hope the purging of the backlog was some consolation for the cold.

But whether it was luck or planning, it was a good strategy, and one you might plan to hold in reserve for next time: a bit like a nuclear reactor, where you have control rods available to cool things down when they start to get critical.

This is how I described it to someone over in Number Crunching:

A few days ago, the project staff put an almost consecutive run of tapes from 30 March 2007 to 3 April 2007 onto the Server status page. During that period, according to the Arecibo telescope observing schedule, the main observing project was the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey - a project which I once falsly accused of generating a high percentage of 'shorty' tasks, but I was swiftly corrected by Joe Segur. In fact, this is a 'drift' survey, generating workunits in the ~0.39 Angle Range. These tasks take approximately six times as long to process as the 'shorty' tasks you may have become used to from projects like the GALFA Study of the Disk-Halo Interface and Mapping HI in a spectacular shell.

ALFALFA (project A2010) should be fairly easy to find in the searchable Arecibo schedules, and seems to be a consistent source of long-running tasks. You could do worse than saving up a few tapes from ALFALFA days to damp down your next shorty storm.