Return (Feb 16 2012)

Hello gang. I'm back from the latest bout of alternative career maintenance. Seems like I didn't miss too much, and unlike normal the server problems waited until *after* I returned. My next disappearance (only about 10 days) will be in mid-April (touring in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil).

Before the usual Tuesday server outage Jeff noticed the splitters having trouble inserting new work into the science database. After some detective work and tests we found we hit one of several possible informix logical limits: we ran out of extents in the workunit table.

Not a big deal, and we hit this limit with other tables several times before. But the fix is a bit of a hassle. Basically you have to recreate a whole new table from scratch with more extents and repopulate it with all the data from the "full" table. We have a billion workunits in that table, so to speed this process up we only moved over workunits 90 days old (or newer) before turning the projects on again. We only need 90 days of recent workunits around for the assimilators to work, but to get the NTPCkrs rolling again we need to repopulate the whole thing, which we'll do more casually.

Not sure if anybody noticed, but I got the "connecting client types" page working again (for the umpteenth time). Let's see how long before it breaks again for some inexplicable reason: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/client_types.php

Okay. I'm sure there's lots more to report but I'm going back to beating down my e-mail spool.

- Matt

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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 update Matt, welcome back,

Claggy

welcome back Matt !!



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Welcome back, Matt. Glad you got things sorted and running again.

And I shall only say again how much your technical tidbits are missed when you are on the road making music. But I am sure the change of pace is good for you.

Meow!
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"Ask not, what your kitty can do for you. Ask what you can do for your kitty."

As it is kitten, so shall it be done.

Welcome back. It's nice to hear what's going on behind the scenes.

Since we're talking about database stuff.. is there anything that can be done for "stuck" WUs that have been pending for several months, or in some cases..years? They are ones where _0 and _1 got credit granted before _2 returned their result, and therefore, _2 is stuck waiting.

Thanks for getting that page back online... the data in it were really old (around October 2010, IIRC) and didn't include a lot of the more modern versions of the BOINC client...

Next low-priority thing to work on: getting the telescope pointing data on the "Science Status" page back working.
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