Contest Online ScoreBoard

Great news!

We have a Real Score Cluster distribution server link added to the N1MM+ logger. It’s on the top of other score boards links:

Tip 1:  If you wish to monitor your club activity only activate a club filter by clinking on your club name title.  Your club name title is a link to activate the filter.

 

Tip 2:  Split the Club competition window and minimize it. Usually a contester’s desktop has dozens opened windows. Every inch should be used effectively  as much as possible)) Look how a small Club competition windows could be: 

After some requests from our users we have created a new page “Club competition”. As other one click tools the link to the page are sitting on the top menu.

By clicking on the link a new page will opened in a new browser tab. On the page are all the active in the current contests clubs will be presented. It summarize all clubs’ members scores and rank clubs in accordance with the score.

We have also implemented a new Club filter. By clicking on a Club name you can get just one club on the page and hide others:

To flush a club filter and to return all other clubs on the page a simple click on a Club name will be needed!

We have added a new “Filter flush” link clearing up all the board filter settings to default. Some guys suggested us to implement some kind of  “tick box”  to clear all the filter settings without going to a special page.

It works fast and easy. By clicking on it you get the same contest board unfiltered just in few milliseconds.

We are glad to report score distribution server testing was successful during the CQ WW CW contest. Just some stats from the last weekend:

1. Distribution server (www.b41h.net)

• During the 48 hours of the CQWW CW Contest, the score distributor forwarded 72,385 score posts to the scoreboards.
• That’s an average of one post every 1.2 seconds.
• The peak rate was 4 in one second.
• 35 users configured their logger to use the distribution server URL ( http://www.b41h.net/scoredistributor.php )
• Postings from 90 Contest Online Score users  ( contestonlinescore.com) were forwarded to the distribution server and then were forwarded to the cqcontest.net.

2. cqcontest.net

• had over 500 active entries on the CQ WW CW board!

3. Contest Online Score Board (contestonlinescore.com )

• had 125 CQ WW CW entries from active users

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.

We have updated Win-Test Online Score program to have “Score Distributor” server in the servers list.

Thanks a lot to Alex, K2BB who designed this program.

Win-Test users can download it here:

https://contestonlinescore.com/settings/WinTestOnlineScore.zip

Documentation how to set it up :

https://contestonlinescore.com/settings/cosb_logger_settings.pdf

 

The score sharing implementation is going well. Yesterday we have configured Contest Online Score board server to forward to the Score Distribution server all the internal postings coming from COSB users directly . The Score Distribution server forwards them to cqcontest.net if a particular contest is supported by cqcontest.net. That means all the score spots published on the https://contestonlinescore.com/scoreboard/ will be automatically published on the cqcontest.net as well. To finish this phase we just need cqcontest.net to do the same. Once that will be done we get a real score cluster everybody is waiting for so much )) That would be no difference which server link is in a logger real score server configuration. Wherever score will be sent they will appear on all board servers in a cluster (if a particular contest is supported by a particular score board).

But we still have some tasks to be done after that. We need to come up with a common solution about user authentication, server replay message unification and some others. We’ll keep you posted.

For the coming this weekend CQ WW CW we still asking you to configure your logger to send your CQ WW real scores to the following URL:

http://www.b41h.net/scoredistributor.php

By using this link your score will be published on both score board servers.