Yoyo crashed, and was then recovered

[spikey_richie]

Saw this news on the Yoyo site today:

http://www.rechenkraft.net/yoyo/

03 February 2008 Crash-Tour T-Shirt
Yes you were part of this crash and you can show it with this T-Shirt. A part of the money will be used to keep the server running.

02 February 2008 Server is back
The new server runs now without any big problems. In the first hours I will not send new work units because there are wus in the world which could be over the deadline. These would be resent by the feeder. So I give you a chance to empty your buffers and upload all wus.

31 January 2008 Server crash
Yesterday our small server was not able to handle all your request. The runtime of OGR WUs was getting shorter and shorter and all hosts requested more frequently new WUs and reported finished ones back. This leads to high traffic in the database and to out of memory on the system. This server also hosts the homepage, forum and wiki of the Rechenkraft.net association. To get them up again we immediately stopped access to yoyo@home. The server went back to normal forum and wiki processing.
Last night we analysed the problem and decided that we need more memory and a separation of yoyo@home and the rest of the rechenkraft.net page. Thanks to the support which I got in chat and to the donations, we now ordered a new server for yoyo@home.
Our new server is installed and got the yoyo@home backup but is currently not yet online. I think that workunits which reached the server will get credits, but it seems that there are a couple of WUs which were not properly uploaded. For these no credits can be granted. We hope to be online very soon.

[Adywebb]

Thanks for the update Spike.

Mmmmmm, spikey_richie..........now that name seems familiar

[gamer007]

Hmm.. This is the first time I can get to yoyo@home's website. I haven't been able to for months.

[AMDave]

There was no big impact to our team as there was only 1 of us crunching it at the time.

Unfortunately when the wu's did upload most of them had been caught in the memory problem and went into "Validate error", so I dropped about 7 or 8 hours of processing. C'est La Vie. No big deal.

Here is how it looked from a cruncher's point of view
http://www.rechenkraft.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=8411

I am very impressed at how fast they turned the whole solution around and got going again.

Congrats to the YoYo team.
Job well done.

A tip: there are some useful scripts available that will check free memory and send you an email if it passes a threshold that you set (eg 15% of total). These alerts are a good preventative measure as you get to respond to the problem before it gets too bad.

[spikey_richie]

Thanks for the update Spike.

Mmmmmm, spikey_richie..........now that name seems familiar

How so Ady? Were you an MOT'er @ WCG?

[Adywebb]

How so Ady? Were you an MOT'er @ WCG?

I was with The PCReview Crew, but I remember you at MOT...........didn't you go over to work in the States for a while?

[spikey_richie]

Yeah for a company in California. I left there in September, and I've moved back to the UK. Looks like I got out at the right time too - apparently the company are going down the pan. Now I work for the troubled NPfIT software company known as iSOFT - www.isoftplc.com

So have you quit WCG to spread your wings crunching for other projects? If so, welcome to AMD Users - you'll love it here :D

[Adywebb]

I still run WCG off and on as it runs worthy projects - but I've branched out to experience the wider DC world

[spikey_richie]

I kind of gave up on WCG recently, I just lost interest after the team website was hacked.

[Adywebb]

I saw the site had gone and wondered what happened - I think Keith Henry is building a new one for them at the moment.