OFFICIAL "SERVER PROBLEMS" THREAD

[KEP]

@Batalov: That was a really great translation... at least it made me laugh

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by NBtarheel_33

But he certainly deserves recognition as a big part of the GIMPS/PrimeNet we interact with each day.

Without question -- I never intended to imply otherwise. My apologies if it was take as such.

But, it is quite clear that what was implement before is not fairing so well now-a-days. Not really surprising considering the age of the current kit and software, and the ever increasing load on Primenet.

I'm in no way suggesting that Scott should be "ousted" -- simply that there is a lot of talent here willing to contribute time, hardware and/or money to either implement Primenet V6, and/or place it on stronger "iron". And, as raised above, there's the whole "bus" issue.

[Brian-E]

The other side of the "bus issue" coin, I suppose, is the "too many cooks" issue. To avoid too many people contributing their own ideas and not working in harmony with each other, there would still need to be one person - or maybe two or three at the most if they have very similar ideas and are able to work very closely with each other - co-ordinating it all. That would be a huge time investment for that one person or handful of people.

[NBtarheel_33]

Originally Posted by Brian-E

The other side of the "bus issue" coin, I suppose, is the "too many cooks" issue. To avoid too many people contributing their own ideas and not working in harmony with each other, there would still need to be one person - or maybe two or three at the most if they have very similar ideas and are able to work very closely with each other - co-ordinating it all. That would be a huge time investment for that one person or handful of people.

I think this gets handled more via the judicious delegation of power/admin rights. Ideally, George (and Scott, and perhaps one other trusted person) would give the ultimate thumbs-up or -down to changes and new implementations that a "second-tier" group of say 4-8 people would be working on (and have just enough authority to do so without screwing up anything else).

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by NBtarheel_33

There wouldn't even *be* a PrimeNet without Scott....

I was just thinking about when I started with GIMPS, the process involved emailing George to get going and he'd email out a list of exponents to work on. When you had some results, you emailed those back and would get more.

I remember when Primenet was starting out... I don't even remember if Prime95 supported it at first but you could sign up and get exponents and check in results through the web interface which was, now that I think about it, cutting edge stuff. When was that...1997-98?

Big strides since those times. Of course, here we are with the Primenet stuff running on Windows 2000, but I guess it's held up okay until the past year or so at any rate.

[NBtarheel_33]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

I was just thinking about when I started with GIMPS, the process involved emailing George to get going and he'd email out a list of exponents to work on. When you had some results, you emailed those back and would get more.

I remember when Primenet was starting out... I don't even remember if Prime95 supported it at first but you could sign up and get exponents and check in results through the web interface which was, now that I think about it, cutting edge stuff. When was that...1997-98?

Big strides since those times. Of course, here we are with the Primenet stuff running on Windows 2000, but I guess it's held up okay until the past year or so at any rate.

The amazing thing to me is that the project caught on like it did, and that neither George nor the participants (up to replacement of any attrition over the years) lost interest and left the project die out three, five, ten years later. It's extremely impressive for a project that began with a post on math.sci.net basically asking "who wants to look for Mersenne primes?".

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by NBtarheel_33

Ideally, George (and Scott, and perhaps one other trusted person) would give the ultimate thumbs-up or -down to changes and new implementations that a "second-tier" group of say 4-8 people would be working on (and have just enough authority to do so without screwing up anything else).

Indeed. And as James already has such trust and access, and a deep knowledge of PHP, (but, self admittedly, not of the WIMP stack) it would seem to make sense that he'd be the third authority for the server software.

The "outside developers" could contribute by way of Subversion or Git, working on (virtualized) test environments with representative (but not real) datasets. When the code is checked in, it is run through regression tests, and then approved (or not) by the three admins.

Three reasons for the test environments:

1. The first is obvious -- don't break the server!

2. Primenet relies on Assignment IDs (AIDs). If a hostile party has these, nasty things can be done (well, specifically, the assignment can be unreserved).

3. Primenet relies on matching residues. Very few should ever be able to see the residue of a first LL until a double-check has been completed.

The hardware supporting Primenet, and the sysadmin of same, is yet another dimension of this problem space.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by chalsall

...The hardware supporting Primenet, and the sysadmin of same, is yet another dimension of this problem space.

I've offered up a DL360 G5 server, but it sounds like it comes down to Scott's okay on it since he's the point person for physical access to the server itself. Just on the off-chance he wants it, I got the hardware together and installed Server 2012 on there... it could be a chore to migrate the website and databases to a new box/updated OS/SQL but the more I thought about Windows 2000/SQL 2000, there's really not much else that could happen, and it's an update that's long overdue IMHO.

Without knowing a single thing about the current web code or DB structure, I'd hazard a guess that it should port fairly well from IIS 5 to IIS 8.5, and from SQL 2000 to SQL 2008 R2/2012. It's unusual to find MSSQL stuff that doesn't upgrade well or has deprecated commands. The best way to find out is to try it.

I wouldn't mind helping with sys admin duties on any Windows based solution...that's my bread and butter, how I keep food in my belly and a roof over my head. Plus it's the kind of thing that really shouldn't take more than a few minutes a week really, once it's running. If it takes more than that to keep a multi-tier app going in a steady state, then something is wrong.

[Mark Rose]

One possible issue with switching machines is the PHP version. There have been some small compatibility-breaking changes in every minor release, so it's possible that something may break.

[Prime95]

Server is running IIS 3.0, PHP 5, SQLServer 2005.

Server is definitely not CPU-bound. I've done 15 minutes of research on gzip html. It seems like turning it on in IIS is a no-no. I might try turning it on in PHP instead.

[James Heinrich]

Originally Posted by Mark Rose

One possible issue with switching machines is the PHP version. There have been some small compatibility-breaking changes in every minor release, so it's possible that something may break.

Originally Posted by Prime95

Server is running ... PHP 5

There's not many major compatibility issues across the minor versions, probably the most notable one being ereg* functions being deprecated (in favour of their preg* equivalent) in v5.3+. Another gotcha that I've seen crop up is the default characterset for htmlentities in v5.4+. For what it's worth, the current server is running PHP v5.2.5.