When I wrote the sad story of our server buckling under the load of the ARRL DX Contest, I'm sure people were curious about the quantitative story. Because of the problems that weekend, we don't have the numbers for it, but we do have them for the Russian DX Contest, which just finished.
As you can see, we went from a rate of around 50 spots per minute received at the RBN, in the time just before the contest started at 1200Z, to a peak of 600 spots per minute at 1400Z. There was a brief drop-out between 0300 and 0400Z due to problems with a backup routine, but then the flow of spots continued at a rate of 250-400 spots per minute until the end of the contest. At that point the server breathed a sigh of relief, as it dropped back to around 30 spots per minute.
For the 24 hours of the contest, the database received 545,747 spots. Our guesstimate is that a major contest such as CQWW or the ARRL DX Test, with their much larger number of participants, would yield at least twice the spot rate. The programming team has done a lot of good preliminary work, to stabilize things at the current level, but the effort continues. The next big test will be the WPXCW at the end of May.\
73, Pete Smith N4ZR
Hi Pete
ReplyDeleteIt's very interesting. Do these number include ALL spots from the RBN (WARC bands etc) or just the contest bands ?
Thanks
HI Pete, in last wpx cw 2010 with my little vertical antenna I put more than 60 spot for minute in best hours to rb, was increible how fast is skimmerserver and qs1r. I upload 3600 callsign for hour in the sunday evening!!
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post thanks for sharing it.
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