Want to see what MSA will look like when the next release comes out?
Want to help us look for problems or point out missing features?
There’s a link on the MSA home page to the new version under development.
Seems much, much faster nolan!
Do you know if you’ll ever be able to archive data prior to 1991?
As far as I know, that data is no longer available in electronic form.
If we don’t have it in electronic form, we cannot load it to MSA. Sorry.
The boxes of the crosstables are out of alignment. Don’t know if thats a major problem, but just letting you know.
Would it best to use a different server. When the federation office moves to its’ new office in Tennessee, would it be idea to have the server right in the office. As the server would only be designed for only the federation. Any uploading of the MSA database would be done right at the server, would take care of many uploading problems.
With the uploading of the MSA, has been performed on a Saturday and Sunday. With the majority of tournaments being performed on the weekend, and the uploading of the new database of the MSA. The large queries on the weekend, as directors checking the database for their tournaments; with the uploading of the database of the MSA. It could be best to only upload the new database, from Monday to Friday. If the queries and uploading of the database can and has crashed the server, it would be very annoying for the directors and the players – if the MSA did crash on the weekend.
Having a database 2 feet away from you compared to 1000 miles is irrelevant. Some companies do not have the capacity (or the money) to have a direct pipeline directly in their office.
You can’t have a new computer program without problems.
Please work on your run-on sentences. You’re making absolutely no sense.
The problem with the server, is being over taxed. Its’ not the major problem of only the members looking at the database. As the server itself performs other duties, other then the needs and wants of the membership, or people wanting information granted for public … or password protected areas. If the federation did have its’ own server, the server would only have to deal with the amount of the data stream, to the server and from the server.
Uploading the server at the server, or uploading the server from a different point of orgin – is relevant. From a point of orgin to the server, will have to accept the amount of the data stream to the server. As the server is being used by other people, the data stream can and will be limited to the amount of data it is willing to share.
You really have no idea what you’re talking about.
First of all (without knowing USCF’s networking), I’d make a guess that they use that server in Kansas for their web stuff. I’d imagine nolan does his processing, then uploads the data to that server.
I’m about 100% sure that msa does NOT go directly to their central database. That would be problematic for hackers.
I can upload a 10 gig database to New York. It can take the same time from a computer a few feet away.
Do you know the server is used by other people? USCF has more than one server, and I’d image, they lease the server in Kansas for web stuff only and not their intranet. They probably don’t have a T1 for hosting, or may not have the resources for more servers.
Nolan is probably one of a few that know what they’re doing over there and has been working on this for months.
Creating big, run-on sentences isn’t going to make the problem go away. It’s going to take time, testing, and bug fixes. Nolan seems to be the only person doing this automated web stuff, and I’m thankful.
Just be patient, and it will all work soon.
Have done the mission for looking, with some logical theories for the reason why it has crashed. The server the federation has and what Nolan is working on can be a older model. When the website did go online, it was only asked to give simple one way public information. The amount of data, with the public information, the password protected accounts; with the larger amount of data stream, going from the server and uploading to the server – could have over taxed the system.
Someone can work on a 1920 Model T, can spend hours working on the project to get it to run. If the wish to drive the car in the Daytona 500, it does not mater how many hours you have spent on working on the Model T – as the design of the Model T – never designed for that mission. The more we are demanding from this server, the less it can perform its’ stated mission. If I’m right, we have not changed the server since the webpage went up in the 1990’s.
Just because it says uschess.org doesn’t mean it’s been on the same server for the past 15 years.
But i suppose any suggestions may be helpful. Even when I do programming, someone saying something off the wall like “puppydog” might trigger something in my head which would solve my problem, or give myself an idea that can fix a ton of stuff.
If you notice that the MSA site looks completely different from the regular website. This probably means it’s on a totally different server to host the application and NOT on the regular uschess.org site. This is likely due that the regular website doesn’t host the dynamic scripting language nolan uses for different queries on players.
Well thunderchicken, wanted this answer from Nolan about the server. Then if anyone talks about computers, you get into your startrek universe. True, you do have better skills with computer programming then myself.
What Nolan is doing is for the common good. If did play the lottery and did win the over one-hundred million dollars prize. Would not have a problem to give a gift of ten million dollars to the federation, and let Nolan have half a million, just to have any type of computers he wants.
The reason MSA looks different than the rest of the website is that it was written by someone other than the person who designed the website.
Laura Martz has been working on making the next release of MSA look more like the current website. (I think the whole website should be redesigned, but that’s a different subject and a LOT of work.)
Most of the website is at our ISP’s, in Nebraska (not Kansas). That’s been true since September of 2003, when we moved from the previous ISP, which was in New Jersey. That’s also when MSA went live.
The only thing that isn’t currently at Internet Nebraska is the current webstore, which is hosted by Earthlink. There’s a new version of it in development, that’s probably the next item on the development list after I get the ratings system back online. (The new online tournament registration module is getting to be a high priority, we need it to handle the load for Supernationals III.)
However, the problems we’re experiencing with MSA will need to be addressed fairly soon. I think those problems are mostly because the database engine that MSA runs on (MySQL) is not really designed for an application as large as MSA. It’s choking on the load.
Our ISP has agreed to support PostgreSQL, the database engine that the USCF uses internally. I do not know how soon we will be able to make the changes needed in the MSA code to switch to PostgreSQL though.
We had an article on this in The Chess Journalist about year ago (shameless plug); it is available on line at chessjournalism.org. Short version: A domain name is not the same thing as a web host, any more than a sign is the same thing as an office. The internal workings of the server are generally not visible to you (unless something goes drastically wrong). What you see on screen is the output of the HTML code written by whoever designed the page.
MySQL has a pretty good reputation to do the type of queries that MSA probably does. (No updates except data loads, presumably fairly simple SQL) For that type of application MySQL can exceed Oracle’s performance.
Is it MySQL that is the problem or is the server overloaded? I’m assuming it is a Linux box. How many processors does it have and what is the load average at peak?
Using two servers and a DNS round robin might be the only option eventually if MSA is just that popular. That should be easy to switch to for a read-only application like MSA.
MySQL has an excellent and well-deserved reputation for being very fast for relatively small databases, those with roughly under 2 million rows in the largest table. The crosstable database has more rows than that.
MySQL also has the reputation of not scaling to large demand loads well, and I think that’s the real problem here. The design decisions that made MySQL fast also tend to cause problems when running numerous large queries.
Incidentally, the hardware that MSA runs on is Sun, and the system load doesn’t get abnormally high until MySQL has many pending queries that haven’t completed yet.
I happen to be an Oracle DBA and I would find this pretty hard to believe. I have experimented with MySQL and to date, anything up through 4.1 is not ready for prime time, although v5 has introduced some nice features. I tend to agree with Nolan, that for small to medium applications without a lot of concurrent transactions, MySQL is adequate. Beyond that, you are pushing the envelope.
Steve
I was an Oracle DBA for about 10 years myself, Steve, and I still have it around, though these days I use PostgreSQL as my primary RDBMS.
I’ve also worked with MySQL for 3-4 years, and I spent several years working with SQL Server, too.
In my opinion, MySQL is now where PostgreSQL was in about 1999 or 2000, it works as designed but it doesn’t scale and it isn’t robust. Unless MySQL is redesigned to deal with those issues, it’s probably about as good as it’ll ever get. (Adding subqueries will help a lot, and the InnoDB code is finally getting better, but I still would not want to use it in a mission-critical transaction processing environment, even version 5.)
It took me several weeks in early 2003 to convince the USCF’s CIO at the time that we needed something more like PostgreSQL than MySQL for the USCF’s internal database, a recommendation I have not regretted for one moment. (Of course we couldn’t afford Oracle.)
PostgreSQL is starting to give the commercial RDBMS’s a run for their money. I think it’s better than SQL Server today. I doubt it’ll ever overtake Oracle, but Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are both starting to badmouth it on a regular basis, which tells me they’re worried. 
Having spent several years benchmarking various RDBMS products, there are (simple) applications in which MySQL will beat the pants off both Oracle and PostgreSQL. Oracle can be tuned to the point where the differences aren’t that noticeable, especially on the right hardware.
PostgreSQL gained a lot of ground against MySQL in those simple apps in verion 7.4, and version 8 was aimed at matching Oracle in several areas, such as tablespaces.
MySQL still has a hold on the ISP market, mostly because it’s cheap and it’s good enough to support something like phpBB, which is about as intense as most ISP-hosted apps get. Anyone with a SERIOUS web-based app is probably either going to use ask their ISP to use something bigger or set up their own server on the net anyway.
I haven’t used PostgreSQL at all, Mike, so I can’t offer any comments on it. But, it sounds like I should get familiar with it.
I have to agree with you that the cost for an Oracle database is prohibitive to most organizations and if MySQL or PostgreSQL does the trick then go for it. I used MySQL and PHP to catalog my movie collection at home and it was more than sufficient (but then again there is no load on the database). And, as you said, MySQL is used extensively on the web and seems to do a good enough job.
SQL Server still has problems when you try to scale it up (and it only runs on Windows so it is not available to me).
I haven’t done anything with V5 of MySQL yet but when I do, I will also include an evaluation for PostgreSQL.
Thanks for your comments.
Steve