In order to better determine when to schedule system tasks, I ran an analysis of what time of day and day of the week TDs are initially uploading rating reports. It looks like the best time to schedule any systems downtime is from midnight on Wednesday until 8AM Thursday morning.
It’s kind of interesting how different this is from real life types of system analysis.
How often do you see peak performances between 4pm and midnight on the weekends?
It would be interesting to see the turnaround times from eventenddate to uploading of the event. It would seem people wouldn’t mind seeing the tournament they played in already rated after their 3 ride home. At least that’s what we try to do as a club.
I suspect ATM networks see their peak times between 4PM and midnight and on weekends, too.
As to the elapsed time between the ending date of the event and when it is rated using the online submission process, here’s a table based on the month in which the event ended. (Day0 means it was rated on the same day it ended.)
Here’s a table showing how many WEEKS it takes between the ending date of the event and the date it is rated when the rating report is mailed to the USCF office: (Most of the delay is in receiving the event, most events are rated within 2-3 days of when they are received in Crossville.)
I’ll bet the numbers for me are a little screwed up since there has been many a time I have uploaded and submitted the rating report on the same day (9pm to midnight PST) only for the server to be on EST and say it was submitted one day after the event. I think your figures might look even better if that was taken into account…
The server was initially in the NY office, so it was on eastern time.
We switched to having the server in the TN office in July, so now it is on central time. This gained us an hour of processing time in the evening before starting the overnight batch jobs (reports, backups, etc.)
If an event is submitted after 11 PM server time, it is not rated until the morning. (Currently the first morning run is at 9 AM.)
The elapsed time chart uses the date the event was rated, the earlier chart used the upload log to track when the event was first uploaded, which could be hours or even days before it was rated.
The data you posted in the first post suggests that the “overnight” batch jobs should be run during the day, IMHO. It makes sense that most tournaments are submitted after the last round, which usually ends in the evening/late at night. Even if they’re not submitted right away, they’re done in the TD’s free time, which is usually late into the night
Anyway, everyone I talk to is amazed how quickly our events are rated now. It’s just plain awesome.
Matt, even if the system was dedicated just to ratings, about a third of the events we rate are still being mailed to us (mostly smaller ones), and the office staff enters and validates them during working hours.
That’s also when ratings corrections are made, when the staff responds to questions about individual ratings, etc.
We have about a six hour window (midnight to 6 AM) for systems tasks, things like daily reports, database cleanup tasks and system backups.
TD’s can still upload, validate and submit events during those hours and we still process memberships submitted by TDs or through the website, about the only thing we don’t do in the wee hours of the morning is rate any new events.
There are some other tasks (like refreshing portions of the MSA database on a rolling basis) that we do from 6AM to 8AM, and we currently start rating new events again at 9AM.
