The problem seems to be some sort of routing problem between the BOINCstats datacenter and the SETI datacenter.

6 Oct 2011 | 22:20:37 UTC
Hey gang. I've been back in the lab for a few days. Figured I'd say hi and mention a couple things.

The HE problems are indeed getting weirder, and multi-faceted. We know the router itself needs more memory. Getting memory isn't the problem. Getting access to the router is. Knowing this, one hopeful option is to perhaps get ourselves off the current link and move entirely back to using campus infrastructure, now that there's enough bandwidth to handle us. But there are so many parties involved on all fronts that, as always, this sort of thing is moving at a snails pace. Meanwhile, one of the routers in our chain, unrelated to us but still affecting us, was the victim of a DDOS attack the other day. Another reason we need to simplify our setup already.

Note that there have been other issues affecting general connectivity. For example: our mysql schedule database swelled too large because db_purge wasn't running for a while, so it started falling out of memory and slowing everything down. This is clearing up on its own at the moment. There were also some scheduler bugs that have been introduced but then mostly if not entirely have been fixed. Meanwhile we turned off "resend lost results" until the smoke clears a bit.

We're also weighing our options for improving the science database throughput. The solutions include (and aren't mutually exclusive) moving entirely to solid state disks (which I find a little scary), changing the schema of our signal tables to bifurcate into good/uninteresting signals (which will vastly reduce lookups and what we need to keep in memory, but will require major changes to all our backend code), and perhaps just adding another disk enclosure with SATA drives.

Meanwhile I just started another informative mass e-mail. It's going out now verrrry slowly (due to recent campus mail configuration changes). If you're curious, here it is.

By the way that Secret Chiefs 3 US/Canada tour was super fun, and I'm about to head out on a shorter one in Europe (Iceland/France/England). There may be other similar tours on my plate in the new year (Western US, Australia, South America). Sorry about the absence, but I'll be back in November and then not going anywhere for a couple months I think.

- Matt