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

[Barry N1EU]

Although I greatly appreciated all the spots from the RBN and the hard
work by the network/server admins, I still feel a great improvement
would be more screening (“CQ” and callsign database validation) by the
skimmer servers.  I noticed myself and others spotted numerous times
when calling dx.  And there sure wouldn’t be a downside to eliminating
all the LW3LPL and “EK” spots.  Losing potential spots of dx not in
the database would be a small price to pay for really cleaning up the
RBN contest spots.  And those “lost” spots can always be entered the
old fashioned way by human ops.  I got a laugh at one point when I
glanced up at my cluster client screen - have a look:

http://n1eu.com/skimmer_spots.gif

 . . . the irony of W3LPL spotting itself as LW3LPL and W4LPL - it
just doesn't seem right that the system allows this


73, Barry N1EU

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 7:29 AM, Pete Smith <n4zr at contesting.com> wrote:
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> CQ-Contest mailing list
> CQ-Contest at contesting.com
> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
>