Remove PI Segment?

[Beyond (Ars)]

The addition recently of Proteins@Home, Rectilinear Crossing Number and Spinhenge@Home to DC Vault was a nice touch. They all work well most of the time and seem to have the resources to support the increased demand. PI Segment is a different matter. I've been trying to join the project since it's addition, with no luck whatsoever. When the website is up at all, it is so slow that it must be run on a home PC with a 300 baud modem. So far I've had no success even making it to the sign-up page. IMHO, this project has no place being in DC Vault.

[Toutouf]

Did you read this one :
http://www.team-ninja.com/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=343507&postcount=51 ?

We all hope normal bandwidth to China to come back early.
It was running fine before this one.
I think "Just" did a fine job and we should specially keep supporting his project when he has problems with.

I understand it makes you nervous not to be able to join the project, create a team, and see your new points in the Vault. But please be patient. Anyway, people already in don't send to much results with those connections problems.

More, many projects which don't give more work since months are still in the vault. If PI is removed, we should see many projects being removed, added back, removed, ...

P.S. : I saw in stats points for PI have been removed... This certainly answers your question. Link to project is so bad that even stats are broken. I don't mind to have it with 0 points until internet connections are back, but please, keep it on the list.

[shauge]

I registered within 10 min with almost no problems and it has worked perfectly since. On the other hand, it has now almost taken 24 hours since I tried to add project to our team here in DC-Vault and still it has not been added. Therefore: It's much harder to get it registered in DC-Vault:D

[umccullough]

What's worse - many of the projects LOST their points on DCV that they had yesterday because the stats obviously failed to update properly.

[Accs]

We all hope normal bandwidth to China to come back early. It was running fine before this one. I think "Just" did a fine job and we should specially keep supporting his project when he has problems with.I agree with your ideas, but I don't believe that adding the project to the DC-Vault will do anything except overwhelm the current server connection. It should be noted that during the Beta testing there was significantly less load than there is now, and it's still early in the project, with many users and teams not yet spun up. Also, the stats pages didn't exist then, and do now. That's still more load for the server connection.P.S. : I saw in stats points for PI have been removed... This certainly answers your question. Link to project is so bad that even stats are broken. I don't mind to have it with 0 points until internet connections are back, but please, keep it on the list.They were put back in. Obviously whoever is running the DC-Vault is living in a different world than we are. :rolleyes:

I don't think the project should be removed, but scoring on it should be suspended until such time as the connection is reliable. By reliable, I mean that the scores should be able to be retrieved correctly for at least a week.

[russkris]

They were put back in. Obviously whoever is running the DC-Vault is living in a different world than we are.

I dont really know who are talking about or what for that matter... Please explain


But in regards to the stats, we restarted the stats engine to do some work on it.

This project will stay in the Vault until PI stops sending and receiving WU's..
We have to give time for "JUST" to sort out his connection problems. Just the other day, I downloaded the client with no trouble at all


Just a side note, we thank you all for all your time and effort to pop by the Forum and post, it's great, excellent in-fact....

[Accs]

This project will stay in the Vault until PI stops sending and receiving WU's..This is fine. It should stay, but the scoring should be suspended until the site & communications is capable of handling the load. I checked my Pi Segment log, and there are four network errors in the past 24 hours doing a download or upload. The software does a great job of recovering from those errors, but browsers aren't that smart.We have to give time for "JUST" to sort out his connection problems.That's just what you're NOT doing. You're hitting his server, and creating an environment where other people will be doing the same, at an increasing rate. This is similar to a DDoS, but at a lower level. Of course, with the current communications problems to China, even a low-level DDoS will effectively take the site down.in regards to the stats, we restarted the stats engine to do some work on it.I retrieved the team stats page four times this evening. Only one of those retrievals resulted in a complete fetch of the data. No matter how much you clean up your parser, as long as they're not sending you a complete report, your data will be garbage.

[Ragnarog]

If the problems with PI persist until Thursday evening, we could be looking at disabling it temporarily, but note that there will still be LOADS of people trying to download/send/recieve from that project now that it's been added to the vault (even tho we may disable stats collection)

Rag

[Nanobot]

This is fine. It should stay, but the scoring should be suspended until the site & communications is capable of handling the load. I checked my Pi Segment log, and there are four network errors in the past 24 hours doing a download or upload. The software does a great job of recovering from those errors, but browsers aren't that smart.That's just what you're NOT doing. You're hitting his server, and creating an environment where other people will be doing the same, at an increasing rate. This is similar to a DDoS, but at a lower level. Of course, with the current communications problems to China, even a low-level DDoS will effectively take the site down.I retrieved the team stats page four times this evening. Only one of those retrievals resulted in a complete fetch of the data. No matter how much you clean up your parser, as long as they're not sending you a complete report, your data will be garbage.
The Vault does not add any real overhead on the PI Segment bandwidth as it only collects stats twice a day and those stats are simple XML (7000 bytes), in fact your four web queries were over 10 times what is a normal daily Vault stats collection. Also, because it is XML, only a complete page is processed (due to being able to check the end tag) so parsing is very easy and garbage can be ignored, but as the amount of data is small this is rare.

This being the situation I am wondering what your problem is with this project as we have worse issues with other projects in the Vault?

[Nanobot]

Just re-read this thread and found this

Obviously whoever is running the DC-Vault is living in a different world than we are. :rolleyes:

As we monitor multiple projects with multiple problems then perhaps we do live in a different world. But attacking one project which has a slight problem at the moment is not going to get you many friends. Some of the big projects have had worse problems and people accept them. Please have a little patience as project problems occur, and it is a shame that this project has had them at the start.

[russkris]

and the fact that "JUST' hasn't come abck and asked us to remove the project

[Beyond (Ars)]

The Vault does not add any real overhead on the PI Segment bandwidth as it only collects stats twice a day and those stats are simple XML (7000 bytes), in fact your four web queries were over 10 times what is a normal daily Vault stats collection. ? Exactly. I think what Accs is referring to is not so much the load put on the project by Vault stats retrieval, but by the HUGE increase in usage as new teams join and new users jump in, all eager to pile up points, add machines, post on the forum and view the stats. Even the Free-DC stats haven't been able to update this project for well over a day now.

http://stats.free-dc.org/new/allteams.php?proj=pi

But attacking one project which has a slight problem at the moment is not going to get you many friends.I sure wouldn't take this as an attack on the project. Jianan has a fine project. The question being addressed is whether the conditions are right at this time for Vault inclusion. But the box is open now, so maybe there's not a lot that can be done. Possibly someone might volunteer to temporarily host the project in a different location?

On another subject, I've run into an issue that may or may not be related to PI Segment, but would like to know if anyone else has observed this:
I have this client on only 1 machine (to start) and after running it for 2 days, the HD partition on which PI runs became corrupted and unreadable. Rebooting and running chkdsk /f fixed the problem and recovered a bad file which turned out to belong to PI Segment. This may be a coincidence, but I have never had a problem with this machine since it was built about 3 years ago. Has anyone else seen anything like this since they've been running the project? For now I've suspended it pending feedback.

Regards/Ed

[Beyond (Ars)]

BTW, I would like to thank you guys for all the great work you've done in setting up and maintaining DC Vault.
It has added a wonderful new dimension to DC for many of us.

Thanks Again, Ed

[shauge]

Some replies to this thread assume that the recent problems are caused by a server overload or local bandwidth problems of the www.pisegment.net (http://www.pisegment.net) server and demand that the project must be removed from the DC-Vault.
Since these problems occurred after the off-shore earthquake that caused much of the connections between the west and the far east to halt, I think that the problems we see is more lightly to be caused by limited bandwitdh after they had to re-route all that traffic. They can't fix an off-shore cable break in a day or two. These problems that we have seen are worse during the Chineese peak hours and almost non-existant during the Chineese night. That have given us North Europeans plenty of time to download clients, create teams, etc, and there have been no problem getting work (I don't think getting two retries in a day that the client handle by itself, fairly can be called a problem).
Ok, I would prefer that the server were in my neighbourhood, but I guess that such problems is what the Chineese have to live with when the servers are located in the west too, and since they are 1 billion people, maybe we should remove all the projects located in the west too from the DC-Vault?

The timing of this PI-segment defense speech is bad since the server seems to have been completely down since this morning (GMT+1).

I wish JUST can inform us both regarding the cause of the bandwidth problems/server overload and the current server downage.

[glennpat]

Right now the website and down loading of the agent is working great! Looks like the project may be pass the big bump it took since I joined a week ago.

[umccullough]

Right now the website and down loading of the agent is working great! Looks like the project may be pass the big bump it took since I joined a week ago.

Yes, it appears JUST has restarted the server when it went COMPLETELY down yesterday - which leads me to believe it was largely being flaky before that.

It does also appear that the bandwidth has become *very* good by comparison to a couple days ago (32kb/sec at least when I just downloaded the client again). I'm curious about how much of this was server flakiness vs. the off-shore network outage.

[mike047]

This project is working fine for me at the moment.

[Toutouf]

Yes, this project looks like being back with no more bandwidth problems.
Sure this makes this topic closed. ;)

[russkris]

No thread on Team Ninja gets closed..

But you are right..... Give a project time and they will fix there problems..


Hopefully JUST can pop by sometime

[JUST]

Hello guys! I came back.
I'm so busy recently.

The news said the cables have been completely recovered and I hope you can visit the website normally. Now the signature is open again.

There was a really server failure on the Jan. 26th and it recovered 12 hours later. All the relating information is on the website news.

In addition, it's a good way to find me by email if you encountered problems. The address is pisegment@gmail.com and generally I check it every day.

[russkris]

Glad to hear everything is getting back on track

[Toutouf]

PI segment close to end ?


2007.07.31 We Have Received Sufficient Data To Get Result Currently, the efficient data server received are sufficient to get conclusion.
We will close the download window but keep the upload window open. You can upload completed WUs and their scores will be calculated.
The upload window will be closed if no data are uploaded for three continuous days. We will also begin to analyze the data on that time.

Read more at http://www.pisegment.net/news/index.aspx

Remove from DC-Vault ?

[russkris]

Sadly I have removed the project