Re: A New Way to Scout
 

Caching. My personal server (which runs primarily team stuff) is borrowed from a friend and getting near 10 years old, so the bottleneck is the CPU with modern content; as such, I have as much cache as I can on everything.

I'm running several PHP-heavy sites (in Apache, nonetheless); both internal documentation for the team and a Moodle for our safety training. Neither are lightweight.

I could probably cut it down a bit (I haven't banished XFCE yet because I've had other priorities), but I have significantly more productive things to do with my time than optimize my RAM usage when there's still plenty free. I optimize the CPU usage and make sure nothing ever gets swapped first.

Re: A New Way to Scout
 

I forgot to show the details running as root. This has a greater view of what is sipping up the RAM. Here are some more details (in the screenshot). I never work on optimizing the RAM! If you want, I can give you a list of all the packages installed on the Pi! That might give you a bit of info on where everything is going! Also, what processor do you have? My Windows 2000 machine is about as powerful as my Pi, maybe even more. The only problem is that it has only 256 MB of RAM! Do you use SWAP? That might help ease the RAM usage of the system!

I, myself, dislike caching because it is hard to make sure it is updated! For the good loading speeds, I use the accelerator, APC. It doesn't cache the HTML. It caches the code to make PHP execute faster. I use the WordPress plugin, QuickCache to cache the HTML. Since it is based on WP, it will automatically update when I add/change/remove content!

Re: A New Way to Scout
 

That looks quite nice. Since I have a reasonable amount of RAM (1.5GB, low for a server but it works) I don't worry about it too much. It's running a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 from about 2002 or 2003, which is why the CPU is the bottleneck.

Caching shouldn't be problematic; I'd recommend Varnish (which I would use if I served more static resources) if you haven't looked at it (though if QuickCache works well you may as well stick with it for WP). It can be annoying to set up but works really well. I also use APC, though I'll switch to the built-in opcache when I start using PHP 5.5.


To return to your earlier question, I think you'd best be served by a single MySQL database if you're on a Pi (though I'd recommend you check out the alternatives to MySQL too in case there are ones with better optimization.) I don't see a good reason to use multiple MySQL-style databases, and file-based databases have few advantages except simplicity.

Re: A New Way to Scout
 

Dude, I am running quite good specs on my Pi! I can have as many databases as I want because there is 500GB of storage! The storage is a hard drive (I boot off this too). I have a partition for the OS, a partition for the home server and a partition for web content. The web content partition is what holds everything served, and it is sized with 64GB (Though I will increase it to 128GB once I start running out of space)!

Also, I dislike Varnish because it is crap when you are running dynamic HTML! I doubt that wp-admin would even if varnish was installed properly! That is why I like PHP-based caching. It is a lot slower, but still gives a decent speed. It wouldn't be as fast as Varnish, but it would be fast enough. Otherwise, I was thinking that is it were possible, to serve the static parts like images, etc. from Nginx, but the dynamic content from Apache! However, that wouldn't help too much because my internet connection is 768kbps up!

Re: A New Way to Scout
 

i don't know if this method has been posted but what my team did at last regional was two people(we sent our driver and co-driver) would look at our next match and go scout the 5 teams (the opponents first) and on a sheet of paper ask them the statistics on their robot) after acquiring information we then go to our allies and ask for their information then we plan a strategy based on all information gathered. we keep all information so we can use it in future rounds/competitions :)

Re: A New Way to Scout
 

Some folks call that pit scouting; others call it useless.

You're actually better off having someone in the stands look at how those teams do in the last match before the one in which they play you, and getting the stats data down to the drivers as soon as it's collected, than asking them their stats, because their stats will almost invariably be without defense and/or estimates--and therefore higher than actual.

The other question would be, why are you having the drivers scout? I can understand if you're short on people, but IMO, drivers should not be scouting. They should be working with data they've been handed to develop a strategy.

Re: A New Way to Scout
 

i am head driver/scout i offered the idea of pit scouting thanks for info on scouting while match going on. i came up with the idea of going to each pit because we weren't scouting at all our first matches.i see what you mean though last year we had only 10 (lack of members)...

Re: A New Way to Scout
 

I'm our team's coach, head of mechanics, and part of our pit crew. Arguably, I should have the least free time of almost anyone on the team. But before every match, I take an in depth look at the scouting data for each team we're playing with and against, and then take a look at their robots in the pits. If we're with them, I ask to talk to their drivers or coach and talk strategy for a good five-ten minutes (sometimes multiple times before a match if it's a critical match).

Actually seeing the robots we'll be in a match with with my own eyes is really important. You can get a good sense of how their robot and team is doing just looking for yourself. That robot with a 2 CIM Kitbot drive and ugly painted bumpers? Might not going to move. Neat looking bot with only the programmer working in the pits? Could be someone to look out for. Afterwards, I actually go and talk with them, to see if we can help them get their bot ready, or just to talk strategy. It's important that I'm the one doing this because I'm the one who's going to have to face them or work with them on the field. Also, because I know what it's like to play in a match firsthand, I know what I need to look for to gauge their robot's performance.

I do agree that just asking teams "how they've been doing" and basing your strategy on that isn't the best plan. Team's overestimate, have a proximity bias, exhibit a halo effect, yada yada yada. Like you said, it's critical to base your assumptions on how their robot will do on your own (well collected) scouting data. On the other hand, actually seeing the robots and talking to their people (as a driver) can really give a better perspective on what your strategy should be.