Re: New hardware added

Well, it's not actually new hardware to be honest. There is a new virtual machine installed, on one of the better KVM servers.

Earlier all challenge checkers was executed on one virtual host, both those that are running automatically in the background and those executed interactively by users.

Today a new virtual host has been installed. It has better CPUs and should therefore be faster in itself. Those checkers which earlier took 30 seconds should hopefully come down to 20-25 seconds now instead. Besides that the server has better CPUs it will also be less loaded since there won't be ten constant simultaneous processes running from the auto-challenge-checker-system.

Any ideas if this would cause issues with existing scripts?
My 13 step checker (http://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC4R8ZT/187) seems to have stopped working - I've tweaked the config slightly but no code changes recently. It fails very quickly but there is absolutely no errors or output of any kind which makes debugging hard.

It could definitely be the cause, I will look into it. Could be that some PHP-module or LUA-module is missing.

Fixed. php5-curl was missing. I assume the checker needs to fetch a bookmark list or something else using http.

Thanks for the very quick response, seems to be working now. (And yes you were right the script heavily uses bookmark lists)

No worries. I just hope that I didn't cause too much trouble with it. Glad you found and read this thread, now I know that they are useful, at least too some.

I could have pointed out the potential issues though. I did realize and know myself that there could be missing modules. I told pinkunicorn who does the support and Target about it. Target was told mainly because we spoke about the fact that I was going to add another server for this a while ago. Wanted to inform him that it was now done.

Some minor changes in the virtual hardware will be done the coming week, which will cause a 5-10 minute time window of disturbances. In short I will adjust the number of virtual CPUs the different instances have, the amount of RAM and maybe how many php-fpm processes that are spawned to handle the load.

For example, there are 10 background jobs that handles the "auto challenge checkers" which now uses their own virtual machine for LUA. It makes no sense in having 100+ PHP processes for that since there should never be more than 10. Also it has 12 virtual cores, 6-10 would make more sense. Lowering the number of PHP processes will reduce the amount of context switching and also the memory footprint. We will also know the max amount of RAM which should be used and can give the VM a more correct amount after that, freeing up memory for other instances.