[CQ-Contest] Reverse Beacon Network - After-Action Report

[Pete Smith]

Wow!  What a weekend - records falling in bunches, 5 bands open for 
contesting at once.  And I'm happy to report that the RBN was mostly up 
to the challenge.

First, the big numbers.  The RBN handled 1.578 million spots on 
Saturday, and 1.691 million on Sunday, or an average for the 48 hours of 
*18.9 spots/second.  This is roughly double last year's record average 
(also in CQWW CW)*, and is a measure both of how much the bands have 
improved and how many more people are contributing to the RBN.  Thank 
you all!

In case anyone wondered, we did have some trouble with the DX Spider 
Telnet server (telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000) on Sunday morning, 
as the load built to even a higher level than on Saturday.  Felipe PY1NB 
did some quick first-aid and got it running again within about a 
half-hour.  Meanwhile, the AR Cluster V6 server 
(arcluster.reversebeacon.net, port 7000) continued to deliver spots at 
full bore, though to a smaller audience than our main and 
long-established server.

There are also some signs that the load that CW Skimmer puts on Reverse 
Beacon participants' computers may be starting to cause problems.  A 
number of Skimmer ops reported trouble with less than 100% decoding of 
signals, due to excessive CPU loading from too many decoders running at 
once.  At least the failure mode appeared to be graceful - my node, for 
example, stayed up unattended all weekend despite being on an anemic 
dual-core Pentium machine.

One surprise, at least to me, was the strong user demand for the main 
Reverse Beacon web page, which peaked at 384 simultaneous users, also on 
Sunday.  Log data suggest that most of these users were using the site 
to track spots of specific stations (maybe their own?), which puts an 
additional load on the database server.  However, the new hardware 
handled it very well, and that gives us a good level of confidence for 
the rest of the contest season.

Future plans?  Well, we intend to do some work on streamlining DXSpider 
so that it will handle the heavy throughput better.  There's no need for 
a lot of the features that put a drag on performance in the RBN server 
role - for example, the server doesn't accept DX spots from users, or 
Announce messages or WWV messages. Meanwhile, we're on the lookout for 
good new features to add to the mix.  Tell us what *you'd* like!

-- 
73, Pete N4ZR
The World Contest Station Database, updated daily at 
www.conteststations.com
The Reverse Beacon Network at http://reversebeacon.net,
blog at reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000
AND now at arcluster.reversebeacon.net port 7000