Hi,
At 09:20 AM 2/10/00 -0500, Stephan Grupp wrote:
>I missed the answer in the digest to the question regarding old results
>that are left in your Primenet account after a synchronization. I, too,
>have wondered about these accumlating old results (although I just
>checked my Account Report and they all have miraculously disappeared).
>Are those "legacy" exponents counted in your P90 years? Had they been
>(NOT to reopen this thread) poached or reassigned in some other way?
This will take a little explaining....
A database merge is done using the binary database format that only
the old-time GIMPSers remember. The Primenet server removes results
from the cleared exponents report if the exponent is no longer in the
binary database. Unfortunately this algorithm has a flaw. The exponent
may still be in the binary database - only now it is marked for
double-checking. So even though you properly did a first-time check,
the exponent is still in the database, and your line still appears in the
cleared exponents report.
At present the binary database has data on all exponents below 7 million
that need double-checking. In the past it had been 5 million, so not all
result lines between 5 million and 7 million were saved. Furthermore,
buggy v17 results hung around for quite a while because the exponent
was not removed from the binary database for obvious reasons.
Now, why did these old lines recently disappear? That's a completely
different issue! The prime95 client sends two result messages to the
server for every LL test. One is an easy to use C structure that the
server uses to update its databases. The other is a text message
(identical to the results.txt line) that I download once a week and
update my database. Once in a great while I plow through the cleared
exponents report and see if the primenet server database has results
that I am missing (there were 5 since last May). I've emailed the 5
users in hopes of getting them to email the results.txt file to me. I also
told Scott to purge the cleared exponents report of all results sent in prior
to Feb 1, 2000.
Obviously this isn't the cleanest way for Scott and I to maintain our
databases. It developed this way partly for historical reasons and
partly due to constraints on our free time.
Best regards,
George
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