:: 03-Dec-1999 04:45 (Friday) ::

Well, just when it looked like things were in good shape.. :) Just can’t
win today, I guess.

As you can see, stats are nearly back to full operations. It’s been a busy
36 or so hours catching up the rc5-64 data, but we’re back on track there.
The only little hitch from today is that the csc stats for 2-Dec are
incomplete. For some reason the 23:00 through 23:59 logfile never made
it across from the keymaster.

Normally I’d just re-run the day’s stats, but rc5-64 stats are running
now and I’m reluctant to try running both at the same time. So…
the numbers for yesterday are ~1/24th too low, and I’ll re-process with
the missing logfile in the morning.

Moo.

:: 03-Dec-1999 00:32 (Friday) ::

I’d like to encourage all the people sending me Mac port bug reports
to use bugzilla instead. It lives to serve you. Feed it.

http://www.distributed.net/bugs/

In port news, AltiVec RC5 support is definitely in the next beta
release. The coders are trying to get one out tonight, but tomorrow’s
more likely.

:: 01-Dec-1999 21:24 (Wednesday) ::

Well, this is most excellent news. We’ve isolated the slowdown to
a single php page on the stats site, and a single change made to
the code on that php page.

We had recently made a modification to the /rc5-64/psearch.php queries
that pulled the search data from a different table than it normally
pulls from. For some reason, this is running much, much slower than
it should and is causing the incredible slowdown while stats are
up and available.

When we remove access to this one page (rc5-64/psearch) stats seems
to run just fine and dandy. So, at this point, the worst-case scenario
we’re looking at is not being able to do a participant search while the
daily processing is running. At least until we can figure out why
the query is running so slowly.

I’ve already rebuilt the relevant indexes and that hasn’t helped any,
so there’s still more debugging we need to do. The good news is that
since we know what has to happen to repair the performance, I can
go ahead and start catching up the rc5-64 data to bring it current.

More details as the situation progresses.

:: 01-Dec-1999 05:04 (Wednesday) ::

Well, that certainly took a lot longer than any of us anticipated!

We’ve created a new rc5_64_master table, but there are still a few minor
issues with it, and the data is completely unaudited against the old table.
However, it’s late and I’ve done too many concurrent “up till 3am” nights
and I don’t think I’ll be awake much longer tonight.

So, until tomorrow, I’ve just caught up the csc stats and brought the web
server back up. rc5 stats are still wonky and off, unfortunately. But,
we may be close. If the new data looks ok and the indexing runs smoothly
tomorrow, we may find ourselves in very good shape.

Thanks, as always, for all your patience and kind words and emails. We’ll
have this situation resolved as soon as is possible.

:: 30-Nov-1999 15:51 (Tuesday) ::

Just a quick update, the rebuild of the rc5_64_master table is churning.
We’re at about 14 million rows (of 20 million) and it’s been running for
about 12 hours or so.

:: 29-Nov-1999 21:22 (Monday) ::

Thanks to some very dedicated snooping on the part of Bruce Wilson, our
“hired gun” transact-sql guru, we’ve got a somewhat better handle on the
problems with statsbox. The good news is, we now have a very long list
of things that we now know /aren’t/ the problem. :)

The bad news is, we still don’t know what the problem is. We’ve finally
decided that the next step is to rebuild the big rc5_64_master table
from the ground up. The involves copying 20 million records or so, and
then generating new indexes on that data. I suspect it will take a non-
trivial number of hours to churn through this data, so please be patient
as it progresses. To speed things as much as possible, you’ll see that
the stats web site has been disabled while it runs.

Once the table is rebuilt, we’ll have a much better feel for where we stand
on the slowdown issue.

:: 29-Nov-1999 16:57 (Monday) ::

The following clients have been updated/added

– dnetc-linux-x86-glibc2.tar.gz linux [glibc2/x86] v2.8002.447
– dnetc-linux-x86-libc5.tar.gz linux [libc5/x86 ] v2.8002.447

Enjoy!

:: 28-Nov-1999 19:56 (Sunday) ::

The following clients have been updated/added

– dnetc-irix6-mips-n32.tar.gz irix 6.x [MIPS/n32] v2.8002.447
– dnetc-solaris26-x86.tar.gz solaris 2.x [x86] v2.8002.447

Enjoy!

:: 28-Nov-1999 18:50 (Sunday) ::

Dan Oetting has developed an AltiVec RC5 core. Tester Joseph McLean, who
has a Sawtooth machine, reported:

“Well now, it’s working FINE and dandy on my G4/400. 4.5 Mkeys a second!
I scored 1.3 before! I’m sitting here watching a 2^32 block get cracked
right before my eyes…”

:: 28-Nov-1999 16:23 (Sunday) ::

Along with the work I’ve been doing to clean up the website, I’ve also
gone through the distributed.net third-party addons page and have
removed all of the stale links, and reorganized it in a more accessible
table layout. I’ve also added a bunch of new links to things that
many utilities that people may have not been aware were available. If
anyone is aware of any other great utilities that aren’t listed, I
encourage you to write to me so that I can add it!
http://www.distributed.net/addon.html