:: 21-Jul-2000 12:03 (Friday) ::

I’m working on implementing a new table in the stats database that should
speed up the statsrun and improve the accuracy of team membership, but in
order to do so I’ll be needing to take the stats off-line at different
times today. I’ll try and keep them online as much as possible. Thanks
for your patience!

:: 20-Jul-2000 15:14 (Thursday) ::

Tally rebooted sometime during last night’s rc5 run, so I’m re-running
rc5 stats right now. In order to speed this up, I’m going to disable web
access for the next hour or so.

:: 17-Jul-2000 14:05 (Monday) ::

Ok, stats are back up, for the most part. The static pages are still
out-of-date or missing, but other than that everything should be golden.

:: 17-Jul-2000 12:57 (Monday) ::

Another update… I am aware that the index page for rc5-64 (as well as
the other static pages) is missing. Unfortunately, the only person who’s
not totally AFK is on the west coast, so it’ll probably be a few more
hours before he’s awake. We’ll get those pages up as soon as possible.

:: 17-Jul-2000 12:34 (Monday) ::

Sorry for keeping stats down for so long. I *finally* tracked down the
bug (retire_to’s weren’t happening properly) and I’m in the process of
fixing it. Until it’s fixed and I re-run OGR, the OGR numbers will be
wacky.

Sorry for the delay.

:: 17-Jul-2000 06:47 (Monday) ::

Great news! OGR is moving along at such a rapid rate that we have already
sent out the entire stub-space to participants!

While this is very encouraging, the downside is that there is still a
large amount of work (over 80%) that hasn’t come back to us yet. With a
fast moving contest like OGR, it is very important to keep your buffers
as small as possible, to avoid un-necessary duplication of work.

Also, the default client behavior will allow OGR work to build-up in the
out-buffer until a flush is called for (which might not happen until all
in-buffers, including RC5, are empty). It is suggested that anyone who is
participating in OGR change this by setting ‘Additional Buffer-Level
Checking’ on the buffer options menu to option 2 if you can tolerate the
additional network traffic this will produce. Note that if you have dial-up
network detection enabled that this adjustment isn’t needed. As well, if
you have configured your client to work only on OGR unless it runs out of
work, then simply setting a small number of OGR buffers will suffice.

:: 17-Jul-2000 05:16 (Monday) ::

While running OGR stats tonight, our error-detection routines found an
inconsistency in the OGR data for today. In order to track this down,
stats might be offline from time-to-time for the next several hours. I’ll
try and keep them online as much as I can. Also, please note that this is
strictly a stats issue; it in no way affects the contest itself.

:: 16-Jul-2000 23:02 (Sunday) ::

The pre-release process is back and its easier to find. You can now find
links to the pre-release page via the clients download page. So please if
you like helping out and want to find bugs that we missed check out
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.html.

With that said the following clients have been placed for pre-release:

– Linux [alpha/ELF] v2.8010.463 2000-07-16

– AmigaOS [m68k] v2.8010.463 2000-07-16

– AmigaOS [PPC/PowerUp] v2.8010.463 2000-07-16

– AmigaOS [PPC/WarpOS] v2.8010.463 2000-07-16

The Following Personal Proxies have been placed for pre-release:

– Linux [alpha/ELF] v318 2000-07-16

Enjoy and remember to always report bug at http://www.distributed.net/bugs/

:: 15-Jul-2000 17:07 (Saturday) ::

Sorry about having stats offline for the past hour or so. It seems that
due to a screwup last night, the 14-Jul stats were duplicated for both
13-Jul and 14-Jul. I re-ran everything and the new numbers seem to be
accurate.

We are working with completely new code for ogr processing, which is why
we’re having these little glitches. The new code is much cleaner than
the old stuff, though, so in the long run the move will be extremely
worthwhile.

Another nice benefit of the new code is that we’ve managed to isolate
configuration data from process data, which means that it’s now safe for
us to make the stats code publically available. Prior versions (rc5) had
sensitive data like sql passwords and the location of the log server
embedded making its release impossible.

http://cvs.distributed.net/ is a browsable public cvs site using Bill
Fenner and Henner Zeller’s excellent cvsweb.cgi script. You can find the
stats code (both html and processing) as well as few other minor bits of
code.

The code is ugly, but I figure if CmdrTaco is brave enough to release his
slashdot code, then the least we can do is make this stuff public. :)

:: 15-Jul-2000 03:50 (Saturday) ::

I wanted to update everyone as to what’s going on with stats, since they’ve
been off and on all afternoon. We’ve been working hard to squash a few
OGR bugs that we found. When we were doing updates, we were shutting apache
down so that we wouldn’t have to try and fight all of you for CPU time
and disk bandwidth. }:8)

RC5 stats are running right now, and I’m also trying to debug another OGR
error, so apache will probably be off for a bit longer. I’ll turn it back
on as soon as I can.

Thanks for your patience while we work out these last few kinks!