[Dxspider-support] Spider stopped working - 100% CPU load

[Dirk Koopman]

Bela Markus wrote:
> Hi Dirk,
> 
> thanks for the fast response. This was (again)  the dupefile.
> 
> This happened after a server restart due to the power failure and Spider 
> was not able to restart without human interaction, which is bad.
> 
> What is about deleteng automatically dupefile upon startup? Wouldn't 
> hurt too much, but would help a lot. (OK, I can set up it myeself. 
> Anyhow...)

Well, I could, very easily. However, there was a reason for it which has 
   probably now gone away (says he, touching wood substitute as he 
types), at least for now.

Those of us that have been doing this for a while remember a spate of 
"inappropriate" announces and DX spots that came around a few months 
before and then during the start of the latest contratemps in and around 
Persia.

The announces and spots consisted originally of a load of general bad 
language (mainly "sexual" in nature) which then morphed into xenophobic 
name calling after the start of that second Persian adventure. Oh and 
that chap that likes to live in caves around the North West Passage, 
that incites young men to drive aeroplanes into buildings didn't help 
either.

The messages were coming in so thick and fast (and heavily duplicated 
[with differences]) that I invented the dupefile and the various bad 
word things to stop it. There was no design work, it was firefighting.

There were very slow, but persistent, loops where tranches of dupes 
would come every hour or two. Obviously this was caused by distant RF 
links trying to keep up and, sadly, succeeding most of the time!

I was changing stuff twice, three or four times a day to stop the latest 
problem. The dupefile was made persistent to cope with the long loop 
times and the fact that the software was going up and down, like a yoyo, 
as sysops scrambled to keep up.

Given that there are very few, slow, RF backbone links being used any 
more for dx cluster node linking (if any at all) and I am not changing 
stuff on the hoof, at least for this sort of problem, quite so often. I 
propose to make the dupefile clear itself out both on restarting the 
node and also by command.

I just needed to get the reasons it was done that way off my chest.

Thank you for your patience :-)

Dirk