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Old Mar 9, 2010, 11:47 AM
quintin3265's Avatar
quintin3265 quintin3265 is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: State College, PA
Posts: 193
Default Compo submission issue "resolved"

Hi,

Some people were stating that they had trouble submitting songs to compos last night. I determined that there wasn't a bug, but that things had actually been working as intended. It seems that the intended functionality, however, was wrong.

The problem results from the caching system that was implemented during the Composition Combat voting period. As you may recall, during that period, the site became unresponsive because of high load. To reduce load, I created a cache of song data that was refreshed every four hours. That means that the number of downloads and views listed for a song could be as old as four hours, and that new songs might not have shown up in the grids for as long as four hours.

After some investigation, I determined that the people who stated they had trouble submitting songs had attempted to upload the song and then immediately submit it afterward. Because the cache had not refreshed in the interval between the upload and the submission, the song was not listed in the submission grid. If the competitors had waited four hours, then they would have been able to submit the song successfully. People who had problems submitting songs last night can try again now that the refresh has occurred several times.

To resolve the problem, I increased the cache refresh frequency from 17 minutes past every four hours to 17 minutes past every hour. I would not recommend increasing the frequency any more, although I'm open to listening to anyone who feels it's very important to do so. The web hosting company will now experience four times as much processing load for this site, and I don't want to attract their attention by increasing the frequency to every 15 minutes, which would require 16 times as much processing power as the every-four-hours scheme did.

I'll also include notices on the song submission pages and in the help pages to indicate that song grids are not refreshed immediately. It shouldn't be difficult to include a clock in the statement, to say that the next refresh will occur at 10:17pm or something like that.

This issue is not related to the errors occurring in Macs during the upload process itself, which is a separate problem.

Comments?

Thanks,

-Steve
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Last edited by quintin3265; Mar 9, 2010 at 11:50 AM.