Subject:
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Re: Traffic Error
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Sat, 17 Apr 1999 01:11:19 GMT
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Viewed:
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699 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, galliard@shades-of-night.com (James Brown) writes:
> In lugnet.admin.general, Tom McDonald writes:
> > In lugnet.admin.general, Tom McDonald writes:
> > > Today about 2:25 pm PDT I noticed things had gone "All Quiet" on the
> > > traffic page. But about 10 minutes later, I reloaded the page and it
> > > gave me at least 7 starwars messages as well a smattering of messages
> > > (all less than 7) from few other groups as being posted within the
> > > last hour. I checked to see if they were new, even though their red
> > > numbers were not blazingly red, and noted that I had read them before.
> >
> > Immediately after posting this, I refreshed the traffic page again, and
> > it seemed that the same groups were there with fewer messages posted
> > within the hour - about what I expected.
> >
> > Maybe it accidentally burped out an "All Quiet" earlier. Also, I forgot to
> > mention that when I refreshed a couple of times earlier (to see if indeed
> > things were quiet) I got the same "AQ" response each time. Just thought you
> > should know.
>
> And it's not just Tom. :)
> I noticed that too, and was wandering over here to ask about it.
Thanks to both of you for reporting & documenting this.
Let's see what we can find out. 2:25pm PDT today equals 5:25pm EDT, equals
924297900 seconds past the epoch, so what's in the activity log snapshots at
that time...? Hmm, nothing odd there, but let's look backward in time a
bit...
924290100
924290400
924290700
924291000
924291300
924291600
924291900
924292200 :
924292500 :
924292800 1:00
924293100 :
924294000 :
924294300 :
924294600 :30
924294900 :
924295200 :
924295500 :45
924295800 :
924296100 :
924296400 2:00
924296700 :
924297000 :
924297300 :15
924297600 :
924297900 <--- 2:25pm PDT <--- anomaly observed here
924298200 :
924298500 :
924298800
924299100
924299400
924299700
HEY -- look at that! The log entries for 924293400 and 924293700 are
missing. And these correspond to 1:10pm EDT and 1:15pm EDT, which would
completely explain the confusion if you loaded the page anytime between
2:20pm and 2:19pm (how close to 2:25pm did you see the problem?)
Let me check my mailbox. Hey, guess what? Cron (the program that launches
the logger every 5 minutes) sent mail saying there was a problem at 5:10pm
EST and again at 5:15pm EST. It's not saying what happened (because I
didn't ask it to log these particular details), but I can guess what's going
on.
I have a semaphore in the logging code which prevents multiple simultaneous
invocations of cron-spawned jobs. This is super-important for things like
sending out periodic digests and stuff like that -- you don't want to start
up a new process to service a pending request until the previous one is
complete. In theory, the logging code, which takes snapshots of the news
article counts every 5 minutes, should be able to do its work in 1/10 second
and be all done with it. In this case, however, it took more than 10
minutes. Why? Because the snapshot logger is still running an old broken
low-level DB library that gets very bloated (large and slow) after zillions
of additions and deletions. It's 75MB right now when it should only be
8MB. Until I cut this particular script over to the new & better DB code,
I have to rebuild its data file every couple of months. I just did that
now, but this is only a band-aid. The reason I haven't cut over this module
to the new DB library is because it operates on relatively "live" data
(updated every 5 minutes) so the best time to mess with it would be in the
middle of the night, when I'm usually either sleeping or banging out brand-
new code. (I also wasn't 100% convinced until now that the problem was
really as bad as it is (was).)
So the problem -could- recur in another month or so. I'll post here again
hopefully before then when I've cut over to the newer & far safer DB
routines. (Whew!)
--Todd
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Traffic Error
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| (...) you (...) I'm not certain, as I was kinda busy doing that radio thing. (...) Umm... okay. (feeling a bit stupider than usual) <:^, I'll just mess with this 10-piece Winnie-the-Pooh puzzle until you work it out. Y'know Todd, I'm surprised that (...) (25 years ago, 17-Apr-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: Traffic Error
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| (...) you (...) I'm not certain, as I was kinda busy doing that radio thing. (...) Umm... okay. (feeling a bit stupider than usual) <:^, I'll just mess with this 10-piece Winnie-the-Pooh puzzle until you work it out. Y'know Todd, I'm surprised that (...) (25 years ago, 17-Apr-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Traffic Error
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| (...) that (...) And it's not just Tom. :) I noticed that too, and was wandering over here to ask about it. James (URL) (25 years ago, 16-Apr-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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