Chief Delphi - registration has crashed

Quote:

Originally posted by Paradox
Is anyone else having problems registering this morning. I talked to FIRST and was told their server was down. I have been trying since 9:00.

Things should be working now.

I talked to Eric at the FIRST office at length about it, and here's what happened:

The problem stemmed from their particular license arrangement for FMPro, the database manager they're using. Currently, they have a "Limited Number Of Simultaneous Users" license, which is NORMALLY fine.

They knew that this wouldn't work for Registration time. So, to insure that FMPro would not be overrun with requests, they had already set up their proxy server to limit the number of requests fed to FMPro at one time.

That SHOULD have worked. They set the proxy server to only allow one tenth of the normal maximum users through at a time into the database. As the database can process a lot of requests per unit time, that should have been good enough.

However, when yesterday's crunch came, we all literally started pounding the proxy server with hundreds of requests per second! :eek:

Each request takes a short time to process. As a result, even though the front end limited the deluge and this should NOT have happened, more requests somehow still ended up being processed within FMPro simultaneously than was allowed. FMPro then responded by issuing "User Limit Exceeded" error messages.

This surprised FIRST as much as it did us! That should not have happened!

Of course what do we all do? Human behavior being as it is, instead of patiently waiting for licenses to become available (yea RIGHT... and risk not getting our desired Regional... :) ), we naturally pounded on our "Page Reload" keys over and over, and hit it again... and again... and AGAIN...

The request queue went UP, not down. When we wouldn't let up, it crashed.

Did we get the hint? Nope! We all happily hung around waiting, merrily bashing our "Reload" keys at it. As soon as FMPro came up again, a huge pulse of requests were already hovering on the net just waiting for the chance to "beat it into submission" again. :)

They "solved" it in two ways: First, they told everyone that it is "temporarily down" simply to make some of us back off for a few minutes so they could regroup without us hovering around to beat it down again! Next as a temporary fix, they throttled the proxy server way WAY back to slow the flood that was pounding on FMPro... THAT worked!

You should now be able to get through. The rush is over. However, even if there is another rush, the changes they made yesterday should at worst cause you to experience a few second delay "waiting for a response" from being queued by the proxy server instead of running into license problems or crashes with FMPro. This should work for now.

FIRST is aware of the problem. To prevent it in the future, they're considering one of several moves, including: 1) Negotiating with the software company this year to see about changing their license arrangement for FMPro to "unlimited". However, that's an expensive solution for a one-day-a-year problem. 2) They may also simply redesign the entire registration procedure to eliminate the crunch entirely.

What they'll finally do is TBD. It'll take time to change the system, and will take some meetings within the FIRST office, so please give them some time to work on it before bashing them about it. Their ears are quite sore today as it is... :)

My suggestion is for everyone to make a note to ask FIRST at the end of year feedback meeting what they've done about it. I'm sure they'll have a better plan formulated by then.

Now that the crunch is over, it should be up and working again.

BTW... As a side note, I've been informed that we all MAY receive a copy of FMPro with this year's kit, so we may all have our own databases as well as office management tools! :)

- Keith