:: 18-Dec-1999 23:09 (Saturday) ::
Well, something compelled me to investigate whether all of the tables
in stats that contain block totals (there’s 3 of them) matched or not.
Unfortunately, I discovered that they don’t.
In addition to the master table, which contains 1 record for each day
that each participant has submitted blocks, there is a platform table,
which contains a row for each cpu/os/client version combination for each
day, and a dailies table, that contains info like how many total blocks
were completed on that day, how many participants, how many teams, etc.
Naturally, if you sum the blocks from all these tables, the totals should
match. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for rc5-64.
Bruce and I have managed to correct many of these errors (including one
bad day for CSC). This means that our most astute of stats observers will
probably notice that our total blocks done will go down for both contests.
This does *not* mean that we’ve lost work, it only means that there were
some days when the statsrun goofed up and essentially double-counted the
blocks for that day. Also, from what we’ve seen, there are no cases of
errors in the master table, so personal stats shouldn’t be affected.
The bad news is that we haven’t fixed all the errors. It seems that there
was some kind of bug in the old stats code that ran on statsbox-I which
resulted in minor differences between the master and platform tables,
differences on the order of a few thousand blocks per day. These errors
will be much more difficult to track down and fix, and since they should
only affect cpu/os information, we might just leave them alone.
The good news is that, by and large, these errors disappeared when we
cut over to statsbox-II. There’s only 12 days since Feb. 1, 1999 that
have errors.
We’re beginning to work on what will amount to stats, version 3. We’ll
be adding some processes that will continuously scan through stats in
the background, looking for any anomalies like this, so hopefully we’ll
be able to quickly catch anything like this in the future.
Sorry for the confusion… keep cracking!