Folding@Home Statistics Pages getting optimized

Just a quick link to Vijay Pande's blog about Optimizations to stats web pages.

Friday the 13th causing F@H Statistics Server hiccup?

UPDATE (11:40 PM, Tuesday, November 24, 2009): An update from Vijay on his blog - Stats recredit in progress simply says that:

"We're running a stats recredit from Nov 12. Sorry for the delay in getting this going."

It was posted at lunch PST time (12:32 PM Monday, November 23rd PST time to be exact) which means it was this morning here (7:32 AM Tuesday, November 24th AEDT time) when the stats were started to be recredited, so today's PPD figures are probably a bit higher than you'd expect! END OF UPDATE

Vijay Pande has reported on his blog that there has been a recent hiccup to do with the Folding@Home Statistics Server, in which a few stats updates have been missed, leaving work units uncredited during that time.

Could this be anything to do with Friday the 13th? Well... not really. The best that I could do to link this event with the superstitious day of bad luck, was the fact that Vijay's report was posted 6:54 AM Thursday, November 12th PST time, which means it was 1:54 AM Friday, November 13th here (AEDT time). That is a very weak link, because it wasn't even Friday the 13th there in California, and also apparently the problem happened overnight (the report followed in the morning), so the problems might have started on Wednesday night there, which means it was still Thursday the 12th here! Haha, very weak link.

Geting back to the story, the missed updates were backed up on another machine, and the data will be re-entered, however it will have to be done manually as they want to make sure it is done right. This will take a couple of days, but don't worry, any uncredited work units you returned recently should be fixed up soon and will be reflected on the Team/Donor stats ;)


PST = Pacific Standard Time = UTC-8
AEDT = Australian Eastern Daylight Time = UTC+11
PPD = Points Per Day

Folding@Home Stats Server updates to be quicker in 2009

Folding@Home's Statistics Server, used to provide all Team and Donor stats etc. will receive an update sometime in 2009 to speed up the time it takes to update the stats database, meaning that instead of waiting the first 45 minutes of each 2 hour update cycle just to see our Team stats page, it might only take the first 15 minutes, and hopefully with an hourly update cycle.

Currently you see this message in approximately the first 45 minutes of the current 2 hour update cycle:

Stats update in progress

External access to the Folding@home stats server is currently not available in order to expedite the stats input process. This was started on the hour and we expect this to take about 45 minutes. The stats updates run in 2 hour cycles.

An intention to update message is currently sitting beneath the lines above, telling us:

"In 2009, we will be upgrading our stats server such that the whole database will fit in RAM (this used to be the case, but FAH has gotten quite big over the last few years and the related databases require over 20GB). We expect that this new stats server should greatly speed up stats updates."

It's good to see that the Folding@Home team works to constantly improve their systems.