How about that? We made it through the weekend without a server crash! We haven't done much to improve the situation, so maybe we're just getting lucky (or maybe we've just been unlucky). Anyway, we've been happily shovelling data through the pipeline and collecting results.

However, we're still working on getting the corruption out of the science database. Every step takes a long time (days), as we're playing a large shell game with a database table that is reaching 100GB in size. That doesn't sound like much in some regards, but this is all being done on a row-by-row basis, plus we have to ensure data integrity at each step, etc. It's slow.

Back to the mysql database for a second - one thing we'll try tomorrow is moving mysql to commit-on-every-transaction behavior. Normally now it commits either once a second, or when the buffer is full. We tried this before and it was a major failure - the disks array on jocelyn couldn't handle it. But now we're on mork, where the logs are on solid state drives. Worth a shot. Normally we're processing hundreds of queries per second - so this new behavior will prevent up to hundreds of queries from disappearing during a crash, not to mention keep the replica in sync as well so we don't have to go through the painful exercise of recreating it every time the master goes nuts.

Still.. I admit I'm feeling fairly certain that we won't be able to stay this way very long and have to revert back to our current behavior. It'll be fun to try, though. This may make the recovery after the outage more painful than usual.

It's also rapidly approaching beg-for-donations season. A mass e-mail probably won't happen for a couple weeks (given everybody's holiday schedules). Once again it's up to me to figure out how to squeak out a large pile of e-mails before we're (wrongly) spam blocked - a mystical art.

Also, for our non-U.S. folks, this upcoming Thursday is our Thanksgiving holiday, so please forgive the short work week in advance.

- 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 updates Matt.

You have earned your turkey this year!

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Update: I just put up a note on the front page, but if you're aren't looking there, we just had a disk failure on worf (the raw data storage server) and it's refusing to reboot. We had this problem before, the bottom line being everything will be okay, but we'll probably run out of workunits to send out tonight.

- 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

How about that? We made it through the weekend without a server crash!

Hopefully will continue like this *wishing*

Also, for our non-U.S. folks, this upcoming Thursday is our Thanksgiving holiday, so please forgive the short work week in advance.

Have a great holiday crews *smile*

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N = R x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L