[Dxspider-support] An observation about adding Skimmer spots

[Lee Sawkins]

Mike 

I am curious where you are getting your Skimmer spots from. 


At my node today I see about 30K skimmer spots per hour and about 600 human generated spots per hour. During really busy contests, such as the CQ WW CW, I have seen over 220,000 skimmer spots per hour. Most logging or contest programs have some difficulty handling over 200,000 spots per hour, even if the node can. Individual users try to handle this massive flood by setting filters so they only receive a small percentage of these spots. This still leaves the user with a huge number of duplicate spots. It is very helpful if the node can remove these duplicates. To do this the node needs to keep track of which spots each user has already received over the last few minutes. Since several percent of spots are either busted or unique, the node needs to find these and drop them as well. Most unique spots are actually busted, either in frequency or call, or are non cqers. Just a couple of things to look out for if you are planning on modifying Spider to handle skimmer spots. 


Lee VE7CC 


----- Original Message -----

From: "Michael Carper, Ph.D." <mike at wa9pie.net> 
To: "The DXSpider Support list" <dxspider-support at dxcluster.org> 
Sent: Saturday, August 20, 2016 7:04:05 PM 
Subject: [Dxspider-support] An observation about adding Skimmer spots 


This is more of an editorial, based on a recent experiment. 


I was able to add Skimmer spots to WA9PIE-2. Here's what I observed: 


- the CPU utilization went from an average of about 8% to about 12% (not too bad) 
- the rate of disk consumption went up quite a bit (expected) 


Those things were fine. But the users didn't like them. I had one guy email me and he thought that the Skimmer spots were some sort of "DQRM" (deliberate QRM). He said something like, "I've never seen spots with mode, signal strength, and WPM in them before." 


So as an experiment... it's fine. My server had no problem with the volume of Skimmer spots... even with over 100 users connected. (By the way, I also "isolated" the source of the Skimmer spots so they would not propagate outside WA9PIE-2.) 


But I've turned it off. I don't see the point in trying to do it until users can "opt-in" for them (similar to what CC Cluster does). 


Mike, WA9PIE 
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