:: 23-Aug-2001 01:51 (Thursday) ::
Moo!
I’ve recently taken on answering some of the help@distributed.net mail,
specifically the topics our front-line help people have categorized as
requiring the attention of a stats dba. (For those of you still in the
queue, thank you for your patience.)
In the course of trying to answer some of the questions, I’ve made some
interesting discoveries:
. A lot of you depend on the phistory_raw page to produce additional
stats you can’t get any other way. (For those who don’t recognize the
page names, this is the Block Submission History page which shows each
participant’s lifetime history as a histogram.)
. Some of you use it so much, it’s putting a heavy workload on both
apache and sybase on tally.
. Some of you don’t really need the history for all time, just for a day,
or a couple of weeks.
. A certain @home subscriber in the northwest Chicago suburbs is
producing somewhere around 1/7 of all website traffic on tally, primarily
on the phistory_raw page.
I’d like to address all these problems real soon. As a first attempt,
I’ve cobbled together some variations on existing pages that I hope will
solve most of these problems. I’d like to ask you to test these out,
especially those of you who do a lot of scripting. They’re not linked
from the existing stats pages, but if they work as well as I hope, they
will be soon.
The new pages are:
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/phistory30.php3?id=1
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/phistory30_raw.php3?id=1
As the filename suggests, these pages return the same information but only
for the last 30 days. You can substitute your own id for the 1 at the
end. They’re only available for RC5-64 at this time. Depending on your
feedback, I might even make the number of days a parameter. Please submit
all comments and feedback about these pages to bugzilla,
http://www.distributed.net/bugs/
As for the participant in the Chicago area, we appreciate your enthusiasm
for stats. We’re not mad, and we’re not going to cut you off or anything,
but please PLEASE drop me an e-mail me directly (bwilson@distributed.net).
We’d like very much to find a solution that gives you what you need without
producing quite so much traffic for both of us. Hopefully, this quick
fix will serve as a reasonable alternative.
On a different note, we’ve recently “hired” two new guys to help with
stats. We’re planning an all-stats meeting this weekend (Aug 25, 2001)
to bring them up to speed, rebalance the workload, and set some priorities.
With that in mind, if you have any features you’d really like to see in
stats, I’d like to know about it ASAP. Items already on our dream list
include:
. OGR recycle/repair
. Cross-project stats
. Better inter-project links
. Site redesign
. my.distributed.net
. Sub-teams
. A decaying average score, so newer participants rise faster and
inactive participants fall faster
. Using id as the id instead of e-mail (retires become a thing of the
past!)
.
As always, thanks for all the cycles!