hi all y'all

just FYI:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/tech_news.html

<quote>

May 5, 2004

Re: Chronic "500" errors when using our web site. 

The SETI@home web site gets over two million hits a day. A large chunk of
these hits are statistics queries which load down the server. At peak times
(usually in the middle of the U.S. work day) the server can't gracefully
handle the load and requests fail with an ugly "500" internal server error
(which shows up in different ways depending on your browser). 

To help alleviate this problem, we set up a second web server just to handle
stats requests (called setiathome2). However, a lot of people (and pieces of
software) have setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu bookmarked as the site to look up
statistics. These links still work, but still occasionally get overloaded. 

So, if you are getting such errors, check your URL - make sure that the
beginning is:
http://setiathome2.ssl.berkeley.edu
and not
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu. 

Q: Why do you use two separate names (setiathome and setiathome2) as opposed
   to using some form of automatic load balancing? 

A: Well, because in theory we want these web servers to do two entirely
   different things. The first (setiathome) would host the home page (and
   all the other static pages). The second (setiathome2) would host all the
   dynamically generated pages, handle forms, etc. When everything was on
   one server, heavy loads due to excess queries prevented other people from
   loading the home page and downloading the software, and this was quite
   embarrassing. This scheme would keep this activity localized to the
   second server, so the informational pages on the first would always load
   (and load quickly). 

In practice, however, this proved difficult. As stated above, many people
bookmarked (and pieces of software hardwired) the first server as the stats
server, and we couldn't just break all those links. So to be nice we left
those channels open on the first server, but enough activity (via links on
the web page) was shoveled over to the second server to vastly reduce the load. 

We are working on the next generation website (to be launched in tandem with
the next generation of software) where most everything is dynamically
generated. At this point we'll (hopefully) throw more web servers into the
fold and use some automatic load balancing technique which won't require us
to advertise different server names for different kinds of web activity. 

</quote>


They care, but they are also working on BOINC and that leaves them little time
for these fixes.

HTH


-- 
Robi
(3.4#@ 3.14 yrs)




Benjamin Gawert wrote in message news:2g9uabFcfobU1@uni-berlin.de...

Johan Louwers wrote:

Are there more people who think that

A)
The seti website is behaving strange and is having a lot of error's in
the scripts that generate the pages

Yes. Can't see my stats for days now...

B)
The site website is in need of a new look and feel, more of this time?

Well, the main page is somewhat overloaded, but overall I think the design
is good. But there should be news on the SETI project and it's future on the
main site, including the status of S@H and boinc. And it would be great if
there's a way to contact the SH team (email form or similar), at least I
haven't found something like that.

And:

C)
They should fix the stat problem asap as it's very annoying to get an web
server error for several days. Forces the impression that no-one cares about
web site problems.

Exactly!

Benjamin