Concept2 Forum

After a number of attempts to get some reasonable information out of the UK forum this morning (morning that is in California), I have finally figured out what BIRC means - Buggered Indoor Rowing Communications. It seems to happen every year, but this one is the worst yet. The system apparently just gets overloaded. I did get one snip of great news out of it. John Hodgson became the first centenarian to complete a 2k in competition.

Bob S.

It's got worse right now as everyone will be getting home and logging on to the forum to see if there's any news.

It's partly a problem with PHPBB (the forum software) and MySQL (the forum database) not being able to scale up to an abnormal load. I'll chat to Chris Rowe (UK forum admin) about it on Monday.

Pretty much hosed all morning here in the East Coast, USA and for the last couple of hours. Either get "Be right Back" or the SQL too many connections message

It's shut down altoghether now, just a short message anouncing it's absence

A bit of a disappointment. I managed to connect a couple times, never got much info before it broke. It's still down at 4pm Pacific time.

Citroen wrote:It's got worse right now as everyone will be getting home and logging on to the forum to see if there's any news.

It's partly a problem with PHPBB (the forum software) and MySQL (the forum database) not being able to scale up to an abnormal load. I'll chat to Chris Rowe (UK forum admin) about it on Monday.

Couldn't there be a separate url for results.. one that could manage big loads independent of running through PHPBB?

JoeF wrote:A bit of a disappointment. I managed to connect a couple times, never got much info before it broke. It's still down at 4pm Pacific time.

It won't be back online before 09:00 GMT (1:00am PST) Monday.

mikvan52 wrote:

Citroen wrote:It's got worse right now as everyone will be getting home and logging on to the forum to see if there's any news.

It's partly a problem with PHPBB (the forum software) and MySQL (the forum database) not being able to scale up to an abnormal load. I'll chat to Chris Rowe (UK forum admin) about it on Monday.

Couldn't there be a separate url for results.. one that could manage big loads independent of running through PHPBB?

A seperate webserver and a seperate database with a bit of funky redirection in Apache would do that.

Or even better - they could simply cache the pages in memory or save off static pages. I ran a site that could handle 200,000 visitors per day off of a tiny $5/month shared hosting plan, simply because I configured it to cache frequently accessed pages in memory (so it never hit the database or even the php parser). Before I wrote the quick caching logic the max connections was closer to 2,000.

"Cannot do query: MySQL server has gone away"

Methinks MySQL server has a leaky bladder. It seems to be away more often than not.

Anybody have a clue if the BIRC site will ever be able to post race analyses or videos?

Results are now up. site appears to be working intermitently.

BTW Ranger did make a show, finishing 3rd at 7:02 something. No where near his target time. I'm sur eit was those fish n chips and Boddingtons the night befor ethat slowed him down.

Yes, everything seems to be running fine now, including race analyses.

I don't race and never really looked at results before. So I was looking at the BIRC stroke/pace graphs across various categories, men and women and note how in general despite the age, pace etc that the stroke rate and pace graph lines are generally fairly flat and linear for all competitors, except one. Though I admit to not looking at every single graph. This one graph just sticks out and I can't quite grasp the erratic data. OK I know stop trying

The first 100 seconds of that particular graph are astonishing, to say nothing of the rest.

Wow, congrats to Nav for an incredible race ( http://concept2.co.uk/birc/result_analy ... c_id=37878 ) ... with a nice finish. Were any other of the forum members here (other than ranger), at the race?