Please Submit Your ITRC Forums Issues for January 2003!

[John Poff]

Hi,

I'm seconding Pete's post about the slowdown. It seems to happen every morning between 10:00am and 10:30am EST. The site seems really slow for 30-45 minutes, and then it gets right back to normal. The regular timing of it suggests something like a backup job or some other scheduled job running.

Maybe your engineers should check the crontabs for something like this? :)


00 10 * * * /usr/local/bin/start_quake_server


JP

[Pete Randall]

Dan,

11:25 AM EST (approximately) and all is pretty much back to normal.

Weird!

Pete

[Pete Randall]

Sorry Dan,

I spoke too soon. Apparently that was just a brief respite because it's still awful.

Pete

[John Collier]

In response to the Warning posted by Ron Kinner:

Ron,

I have the perfect, easy, and even free answer to your current issue.

Bring in Netscape and make it your default browser. It doesn't care what happens to the settings in IE and the latest version lets you control cookies on a per-site/per-domain basis in real time and will let you kill or allow pop-ups from web sites as well. You can also manage existing cookies through their interface (never knew I had so many even with the strict settings I had imposed)and micomanage the settings for which web sites are allowed pop-ups if you wish.

Contrary to what M$ would have you believe, they aren't the only game in town.

Sorry if I stepped on anyones toes with this, but I just had to post it. Perhaps it will help someone out there...

[Wodisch]

Hey John,

I am with on the toe-stepping!
Netscape 7.01 works great for me (as did 7.0 as did 7 beta).
And the same is true (for the forums, at least) for Beonex, Phoenix, Mozilla (have not tried Opera, yet).

Wodisch
(still on the "good" side of the atlantic ;-)

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Wodish, you're using the wrong ID. Now you'll be getting points again. :)

Opera 7 is hopeless for the ITRC at the moment. Opera 6 works great (using that right now).

[John Collier]

Wodisch,

Nice to see I'm not alone. Thanks for the support...

[Moe Wodnicki]

I noticed that my rankings on beepz stay stagnant for a couple of weeks at a time while everyone elses moves. Every 3 weeks, it corrects. Is there some kind of software glitch? I'd like to also suggest that you add bunny stats next to the points. Bunnies are more representative of a person's prowess in solving problems than points. I've seen points awarded for wrong answers, or just for responding. Bunnies are a lot harder to amass than points. Since they're already on the stats page it shouldn't be that difficult to add them to the forum pages.

[Barbara Spadaro_1]

Dan,
It would be interesting to note the timezone of all those people with speed/access problems as I'm here at GMT+10:00 (AEST) and have yet to experience the 2-page upload!
On a positive note, I like the suggestion of a forum for scripting. Judging by the popularity of a recent database thread of "send in your best scripts" it could be a real winner!
Sounds like you have a thankless task ahead of you!
cheers
Barbara

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Moe, I don't know why sometimes some persons lack behind. It is impossible to check al 5500 ID's by hand/eye and I guess that the overview lists don't always give what I expect, but it is what I have to go on.

If there have been enough complaints, I start a script that updates all ID's that already gathered points so far whether they increased or not.

Manual updates are done on every ID that I report their metrics on in congrat threads to reflect the situation on the date and time I post it.

There's one more possible glitch: If the total points exceed the points in the HP-UX forum, the number is not decreased on reading the list, and the ID is thus not added to the list of ID's to be refetched. This is what's happening to you:

a5:/u/usr/merijn/tmp/itrc 103 > grep CA818411 web2db.log
m 495 WARN: CA818411 gone backwards from 1827 to 788! (restored)
a5:/u/usr/merijn/tmp/itrc 104 >

Your HP-UX points are 788, but you've gathered a lot of points in the other areas, which - in my stats, are added to the total. It *is* possible to revamp the analyzing script to only get the HP-UX forum points, but that would change complete history. It's easy to change the script to add those backward ID's to be added to the change list.

Dan?

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Sorry Moe, forgot to answer the Bunny part. Bunnies are covered. Completely.

Fetch a stat from http://www.cmve.net/~merijn or https://www.beepz.com/personal/merijn and check the last few columns. The headers should say enough. The last column is the avarage number of points a member has gotten asigned to his answers.

If you want some other sorting, just fetch the list and reorder using sort or perl.

Enjoy, have FUN! H.Merijn

[Moe Wodnicki]

I am aware of the Bunny stats on beepz. I was trying to get you to add it next to a person's point totals on the forum pages. Maybe an icon of a bunny with a number. Maybe you could remove the meaningless self-assigned star and replace it with a bunny and a number representing the number of bunnies that person has accrued. The self-assigned star IMHO is a mistake. A lot of people are experts only in their own minds. The bunny count would be more representative of a person's expertise IMHO. Thanks for listening.

[Patrick Wallek]

Moe,

There is NO WAY that Merijn (procura) would be able to replace the star under a persons name with something else. The main reason is: Merijn does NOT work for HP. The stuff he has done is purely on his own time and out of the goodness of his heart.

The stat you request would have to come from HP and Dan Gazzaniga and his team.

I personally don't see much use in such a stat, but each person is entitled to his/her own opinion.

By the way, probably 99% of those of us that answer questions on this board are NOT HP employees. We just enjoy helping people and getting them going in the right direction when they have a problem.

[John Bolene]

Just about like clockwork, the forums got dog slow again today around 9:30 CST

I have given up using the forums between 9 AM and noon CST as I just cannot stand the pain.

I waited until 15:00 CST to find the current gripe list and add to it.

[Wodisch]

"atlantic" - do I have to say more?

[Moe Wodnicki]

Patrick, I was unaware that Merijn wasn't affiliated with HP. I wouldn't imagine anyone would devote so much time to doing what he did with no affiliation. I'm a volunteer myself. Say you're the average first time customer visiting the forums. You post a question and someone with a self assigned "expert" star next to his name answers. He has a green cap, 2 bunnies. His response is totally wrong, but how would the customer know? Another person with an HP logo, Wizard hat, 10 bunnies answers and directs him to a page on the HP site with absolutely no relevance to the problem, but again how would he know? Then someone answers with a grad cap and 100 bunnies. He has a totally different take on it and is right. How else would he get all the bunnies? You're the first time customer. Who's advice would you believe, knowing nothing about your equipment? Another point to consider is that the bunnies would feed our egos more than points because the bunny is more representative of actual "solves". There aren't many forum helpers that know about Merijn's stats page and it takes time to go there and check your standings. Mine are still 2 weeks out of date.
Dan, what do you think about the bunny idea?

[Patrick Wallek]

Hi Moe,

Not to start too much of a debate here, BUT, The number of "magic rabbit" answers a person has, does not necessarily mean that his / her answer is going to be any better than anyone elses.

I do understand what you mean though. All answers here are "No Lifeguard On Duty - Swim At Your Own Risk". I sincerely HOPE that everyone that posts realizes that. The best of us make mistakes. No one that I know would purposely post something that would kill your machine, but ANYTHING is possible.

By the way, you can see how many 8-10 point answers each person has by going to their profile (click on the name), then scroll all the way down to the "Solutions" column and click on the "more..." link at the bottom of that list.

Here's the link to mine as an example:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/TopSolutions/1,,CA18242!1!solutions,00.html

Don't get me wrong, I am probably one of the Forums biggest supporters, I LOVE THIS PLACE, but I don't particularly like the bunny idea, but that's just my opinion.

You should also look at it this way though -- If you added that functionality, then EVERY TIME a person loads a page, the Forums servers would have to go through EVERYONE'S profile, compute the number of "Magic Rabbit" answers they have, generate the graphic, and display it. Let's face it, the Forums are slow enough at times (sorry Dan!), let's not add anymore work for them to do when you load a page.

OK, I'll get off my soapbox now.

Have fun in the Forums, Moe.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Thanks for the kind words Patrick :)

Moe, for what it's worth, it takes more time to answer the FAQ about the stats, than it takes to maintain the stats, which is by now (I run it since April 2002) is almost fully automated.

Enjoy, have FUN! H.Merijn

[John Bolene]

Somebody fed the rabbits last night.

At least at 8:00 CST this forum is positively the fastest it has ever been.

I can't wait until the magic 9:30 to see if it takes the normal nose dive.

[John Collier]

Well, if they fed the bunnies, they either used low quality feed or they gave them small portions. They were already slowing down when I loaded this page and it's only 8:40 am CST.

Should we notify the SPCA??

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Dan:

Hell, the rabbit(s) died. It's ~1200 EST and response time is measured in the 2-minute range.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Pete Randall]

The bunnies are obviously anorexic.

Me too,
Pete

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

I'm with Wodisch here (on the right side of the ocean). Speed is far above avarage.

Today is/was a fun day for ITRC!

Enjoy, have FUN! H.Merijn

[hpuxhelp]

The search function has not been working at all for the last 2 weeks. the only time that I can use it was late at night around 8 or 9pm. I often get this error message
error code 400 Malrequested...
Can you please fix this so that we all can search for quick answer instead of reposting the question that already been post...
Thank you