NEWS

Hardware freaks trying to make some sense out of a bunch of numbers

Did I speak too soon?
.....Looks like the members not in the top 100 made a rebound today. Are they weekend warriors? I do not know. I just hope that they can keep it up :).
.....A word of note on the "split" graph. The total work units on that graph will be different from the total work units shown in the "team work unit/day" graph. Reason for this is simple. The Club Team page is updated once per day at somewhere around 2-3pm EST. The individual team pages are constantly being updated. When i get around to getting the data for stats it may be around 9pm EST. Therefore WUs are being processed and included in the individual team page for 6-7 hours.

Movement in the Top 20 Members
.....mjdewitt passes Beryllium for the #8 spot
.....C. Eric Smith bounces past Rat Bastard back into the #12 spot.
.....leech and Uncomm0n move up a spot each into the #15 and #19 spots respectively.
-zAmboni

SouthPark Admin Crew pulls a fast one
Panders reign as the King of Team Lamb Chop is over. SouthPark cranks out 237 work units and takes over the Team #1 spot!

Yet another new graph....
.....To show how many WUs the top 100 team members contribute (compared to the rest of the team members), I added a graph showing this split between the two groups. Currently the numbers may not be accurate (I'm working on it), but the graph does show the relative numbers of WUs each group produces.
.....I also modified a couple of graphs to be able to show all of the team members and hopefully show things alittle better. The problem is that i think that those graphs may look alittle confusing. Let me know if there are any problems.

Movement within the top 20
.....Rat Bastard passes up C. Eric Smith for the #11 Spot

Monthly Throughput should be OK
.....They aint shut me down yet! I just got my weekly report from Mediaone. Should make it through the end of the month with throughput to spare. I believe some of the changes in the site made quite a difference.

That is all for now!
-zAmboni

Bah Humbug
.....go so see what could be a great home run battle and what do you get? Pitchers scared to pitch to Sosa and McGwire :P. Well at least Sosa put a charge into one and *almost* hit it out.

Something to Ponder
.....Team Lamb Chop processed a total of 1044 WUs yesterday. The top 100 team members accounted for 815 of them. That leaves the rest of the team processing 229 WUs. This means that 1148 team members accounted for only 229 work units yesterday. Im sorry to say....that is pretty weak :(.

A Couple of Changes
.....changed the top 100 team member graphs. Instead of 10 different graphs i made the graphs contain 20 members each. Got rid of the "big pic" graph also. Hopefully the new graphs will make it a tad easier to see where you stand against others around you.

Team Lamb Chop News
.....Team Lamb Chop lost a top 100 member over the past couple of days. Nishodan.org left the team and took with him 591 work units.
.....If you havent noticed...The team average CPU time per work unit has been lowered over an hour in the past month. A month ago the teams average was about 20 hrs. Right now the average is below 19 CPU Hrs/WU. The current daily average has hovered around 16 hrs for the past week or so.
.....SouthPark and guru are both cooking with gas. The past two days they have posted over 100 work units processed. Today South Park had 154, guru with 117.
.....ojohnson passed up Beryllium for the #7 spot
.....leech moves up into the #17 spot
.....acripps cripps up into the #19 spot

Sweet Team Lamb Chop Moves
.....guru@crashing windows makes a big jump and leaps past both Gonzo *AND* chtuhlu for 3rd place!
.....Rat Bastard steals some of OrlBamf's thunder, beats him into submission, while hopping two others also to move from #26 to #23.
.....leech jukes out....count them....4 defenders and sweeps around end and leaps from #36 up to #32.

OK well maybe not yet....
.....i was able to update things today. I was finally able to access the SETI pages. Apparently the problem lies with my ISP and not with the SETI servers. The SETI servers are supposed to get a hardware upgrade sometime in the next couple of days....if the site is down and you cant send your work units, most likely this is the problem.

Some SETI@Home Server Problems Explained!
.....this was posted on the SETI homepage tech news section.....

September 17, 1999

We've had server performance problems in the past week. Some of these have involved the UCB network, which is beyond our control. However, the continued increase in usage seems to be once again pushing the limits of our servers. There are two bottlenecks: the data server and the Informix server for the user database. The data server runs many (256 to 512) instances of our server program. It's on a machine that originally had 256 MB of RAM. This machine was thrashing (excessive paging); it took us a while to figure this out. We increased the RAM to 512 MB, and are ordering another 512 MB. Thrashing, however, is still a problem, and we eventually plan to upgrade this host to one with a memory capacity of 4 GB or more.

The Informix server has two problems. It isn't providing quite the throughput we need, and it does lengthy (20-30 second) "checkpoints" during which no transactions are handled. We have fiddled with many configuration parameters, with mixed results. We're trying to get Informix to help us with this. Our long-term plan is to upgrade this machine to a machine with more CPU power, more memory, and a disk controller with a large write cache.

Intel has donated a couple of machines to SETI@home. Originally we planned to use these as splitters. However, we may end up using them as servers (see above).

SETI@Home Changing Servers?
.....I havent been able to access the SETI@Home servers since last night. I saw on their site that they were going to do a server upgrade sometime soon....they may have started already. I may not be able to do an update unless they get the servers back up and running, and i can access their site.

No Page Updates Tomorrow and Wednesday
.....I am going to be out of town tomorrow (tues) and wednesday on some very important business ;-). I wont be able to update the pages/graphs until sometime late wednesday at the earliest. I may need alittle help while i am out if anyone can access the SETI site tomorrow and wednesday could they load up the Club Team and Team Lamb Chop stats pages, save them both as HTML and then send them to me? I may be out of town, but i dont wanna lose some of the stats for the page. Email them to me at zamboni@mediaone.net. Thanks.
-zAmboni

Weekly Winners and Losers

Winners:

Losers:

.....There were 10 members in the Top 100 in the past week that did not complete a single work unit...

Top 20 Movement
.....Gonzo passes cthulhu for the #3 spot
.....tron passes Beryllium for the #6 spot
.....C. Eric Smith passes Justin for #12
.....OrlBamf and Rat Bastard are neck and neck...both passing a few for #15 and #16 respectively

Changes in the Lamb Chop Pages
.....Included link for news archives
.....I got my "personal pages report" for my webspace (that these pages are on). So far this month there has been over 180MB of throughput! Unfortunately they only allow 250MB of throughput for the entire month. There is a possibility that I may end up going passed the alloted 250MB and they may shut down the site till the end of the month. By my calculations, I *shouldnt* but you never know! To help try to alleviate this problem, i have gotten rid of the "starry" background on the pages, got rid of the Ars Banner except for the front page.......and lastly trimmed down the "Team Ars Lamb Chop" background for the side bar. If you are running at high resolutions you may notice it start to repeat now. Just these three changes will save on a heck of alot of bandwidth. I *NEVER* thought that these pages would have been this popular! I thank you for your support :-)

Top Team Movement
Linux and SETI.Germany continue to battle it out.....they switched places *again*

I guess that is all for now!
BTW i will try to get started on the Tips page tomorrow.......-