Day: November 27, 2017

What about our server performance metrics? Would it be enough in case of board users increasing after finalizing real score cluster? We’ve prepared few CPU usage report graphs:

As you see 100 user sessions loaded CPU by the only 5%. We constantly working on script and DB optimization.  That’s why CQ WW CW contest 100 users sessions got CPU load 1.5 times less than ARRL SS CW with just 60 user sessions.

Anyway there is a lot of room for improvement! Take a look at the hourly CPU load graph. There are some CPU load spikes produced by a script running in a beginning of every hour calculating the “Highest rate” for a contest. It does a search over 100K log entries withing few seconds:

So are we ready for the cluster? The answer is “Yes”.  The biggest number of online score board users I’ve ever seen  was 600 during the last CQ WW CW on the cqcontest.net.  If we do some  calculations we could figure out the COSB CPU load would be around 30-35% with 600 online users. Anyway there is a lot of room for improvement! The current server is a modest VPS. So RAM and vCPUs could be easily upgraded. Moreover we designed our server side scripts such a way to be ready to split incoming traffic to a front servers cluster.  More to come …

The next great step in the The Real Score Cluster implementation just happened. We did the first full functional cluster test during the last ARRL DX CW contest. All the 100% score postings from over 300 contesters were shared between two scoreboard servers cqcontest.net and COSB for the first time!  We didn’t notice any significant gaps during that testing.

Thanks for all  the Real Score Cluster guys who did a lot to make this event a big success:

• Dmitry, R4WW the CQcontest.net owner
• Bruce, WA7BNM the distributor server creator

How that works:

=> All the incoming traffic to the Distribution server (or Score distributor) is forwarding to COSB and CQcontest

=> All the incoming traffic to the COSB is forwarding to the Distribution server and after- to the CQcontest .

=> All the incoming traffic to the CQcontest is forwarding to the Distribution server and after – to the COSB 

We still have a lot of things to be done to finish the Real Score Cluster infrastructure basement.  Unfortunately during this period might be not all postings to be shared or they could be shared partially.

You could be a part of the project! The best you can do to help us would be configuring your logger to send your scores to the Distribution server ( http://www.b41h.net/scoredistributor.php ).

Please read https://blog.contestonlinescore.com/documents/ how to set up your logger to be ready for the Real Score cluster the most efficient way.