I've been watching the systems operate throughout the evening with an eye toward minimizing download problems in the short term. It appears that it will take us several weeks if not months to finally negotiate, plan, and execute the changes we have planned in our hosting facilities.
In the mean time it appears that there are many things we can do in the short and medium term to avoid any problems.
With that in mind I will share with you my observations from this morning. At approximately 0200 EDT at least 40 separate systems converged to download their rulebase files all at once. This saturated our available bandwidth and I'm sure slowed things down quite a bit for those involved. Except for this one incident I saw nearly open capacity for the remainder of my monitoring time (several hours) - even though the rulebase compilers are running.
This kind of thing is common when folks use scheduled processes... Great minds, after all, think alike so often many people will pick the same time to schedule their processes.
The best solution to these congestion patterns would be for everyone to trigger updates based on our update notifications. However, I recognize that this might not be possible, desirable, or practical for some systems. (We do have plans to fully automate updates in the future but that's not something we will be doing in the short term).
For those systems which prefer strongly to use scheduled updates, please follow these guidelines to ensure that large numbers of systems don't converge on a single time.
The following schedule is based on the first letter of your license ID. Schedules are separated by even and odd hours, and are further separated by 4 minutes for each letter within a given hour. You should be able to calculate a good time-slot for your system using these guidelines. Using the these guidelines everyone should see improved performance and fewer (if any) errors.
I will use the 0100 hour to represent any odd hour (1,3,5,7,9,11) and the 0200 hour to represent any even hour (0,2,4,8,10). The following chart shows safe times in the 0100 through 0200 hours based on the first letter in your license ID.
a - 0100 b - 0200 c - 0104 d - 0204 e - 0108 f - 0208 g - 0112 h - 0212 i - 0116 j - 0216 k - 0120 l - 0220 m - 0124 n - 0224 o - 0128 p - 0228 q - 0132 r - 0232 s - 0136 t - 0236 u - 0140 v - 0240 w - 0144 x - 0244 y - 0148 z - 0248
If you are using scheduled tasks to update your systems please make changes to your schedules as soon as possible.
Those who are using our update notifications to trigger your downloads please keep doing what you are doing!
THANKS! _M
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