16 Feb 2012 | 21:04:27 UTC
Hello gang. I'm back from the latest bout of alternative career maintenance. Seems like I didn't miss too much, and unlike normal the server problems waited until *after* I returned. My next disappearance (only about 10 days) will be in mid-April (touring in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil).
Before the usual Tuesday server outage Jeff noticed the splitters having trouble inserting new work into the science database. After some detective work and tests we found we hit one of several possible informix logical limits: we ran out of extents in the workunit table.
Not a big deal, and we hit this limit with other tables several times before. But the fix is a bit of a hassle. Basically you have to recreate a whole new table from scratch with more extents and repopulate it with all the data from the "full" table. We have a billion workunits in that table, so to speed this process up we only moved over workunits 90 days old (or newer) before turning the projects on again. We only need 90 days of recent workunits around for the assimilators to work, but to get the NTPCkrs rolling again we need to repopulate the whole thing, which we'll do more casually.
Not sure if anybody noticed, but I got the "connecting client types" page working again (for the umpteenth time). Let's see how long before it breaks again for some inexplicable reason:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/client_types.php
Okay. I'm sure there's lots more to report but I'm going back to beating down my e-mail spool.
- Matt