Re: Judge downtime protection ideas

 
> 1.  When the job that processes games runs, it will detect when the
> LAST time it ran was, and if that time is more than X ago
> (suggestions for X? Two hours?  Twelve hours?  How long constitutes
> an "outage"?), it will consider an outage to have occurred.

With a default install, twenty minutes is long enough to guarantee the
loss of some game mail with a sufficient game load. An nJudge will
automatically move all deadlines out a day if it detects an outage over
5 minutes. Also, automatically resuming operation after an outage is
not necessarily a good idea. DPjudge has a hardier file system than
nJudge, so that's less of an issue, but automatic systems should
usually stay down until brought up when they go down unless it really is
possible to cover every possible recovery scenario... or at least
recognize the ones that aren't covered accurately. There have been
cases where judges with auto-recovery scripts flailed, sending out
hundreds of "Time warp" messages. This was not only a huge
inconvenience for game masters, it also made mail from the judge
undeliverable to many players for a long time.

> 2.  For those games being processed in the run just after "an outage
> has occurred", if the game would process under CD, or would dismiss
> any players for missing the deadline, rather than doing so, the
> deadline will be extended automatically to the current date-time plus
> Y (suggestions for Y? One "movement phase deadline" length?)

That would be the simplest thing that could possibly work. Not moving
the deadline any closer would also be a plus.

> 3.  All other games would process as normal.  Question:  is this
> insufficient?  Should ALL games get their deadlines extended so that
> a game that might happen to have its deadline only an hour after the
> judge is restored to service don't get the shaft during an upcoming
> processing-run? Perhaps the treatment should be given to all games
> having a deadline during the upcoming 24 hours or anytime before??

The above is probably sufficient. Ideal behavior, IMO, would be to
extend all games where the deadline is closer than the current interval
by 24 hours, with a minimum of 24 hours to the deadline. This gives game
masters at least 24 hours to make adjustments individually in games
without requiring manual adjustment in most cases and without creating
a run away delay if recovery flails.

Chris



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