Putting Netsplit-Stats into Networks Rankings?

phrozen77

Just thought about if it would be possible to let Netsplit-statistics also take influence on the Networks rankings, because imho it also is a big advantage for "future" users if they´d have to deal with a massively splitting or most-of-the-time stable network.

i know that this would be quite much of a hassle to realise, but i think it would be worth the effort to make this service even better Smile

regards,
phrozen77

Talrias · Lurker Joined: 16 Feb 2004 Posts: 163 Location: :noitacoL

How do you calculate this reliably? You would have to put a bot in various large channels on the network and hope that there was at least one user from each server in that channel, you would have to be able to realise what a netsplit quit message is and what isn't (some quit messages may look like netsplit quit messages).

Chris

Jason · Posted: Jul 13, 2004 2:24pm Post subject:

Simply put, we don't have the resources to keep bots on all the networks we monitor.

Each bot takes up several megs of ram.

Lets just assume a bot takes up 4 megs of ram, and we only index 1000 networks (we index more networks and the bots use up more ram), even underestimating the situation, that is 4 megs * 1000 networks = 4 gigs of ram.

The server has 2 gigs of ram, and most of that is used for the database ...

We'd need somewhere around 6 gigs of ram. Then we'd have to weight the ability to see netsplits vs the ability to launch whois robots for every network. There are a lot of cool things that could be done, but I'm afraid there are limitations when we're dealing with thousands of networks instead of a hand full.

With that said, ideas are always good, don't let this prevent you from posting other ideas :)

phrozen77 · Posted: Jul 13, 2004 2:41pm Post subject:

i know that this is a _very_ large and resource-intense thing to do, but what about when it comes to distributed computing?

there are some services that offer processing time and such, also you could (again, much work) put up your own client that does this, ran either by the admins or the users of searchirc (well, count me in, also got seti running and got a reasonable machine running here 24/7, and im sure that there are others that would run it Smile

)

then again you could implement many more features you´d like / got in mind... but it should be made immune to spoofing attempts, by using encrypted communication, but that i leave to your imagination Wink

katsklaw · Guru Joined: 28 Jun 2004 Posts: 1064

I think a client bot installed at the IRC Networks expense like say a heavy mod of eggdrop that "reports" stats would be a fairly decent idea. The current scrawl could spot check nets for accuracy .. nets that report user count accurately outside a certain percentage constantly could be removed.

Jason · Posted: Jul 13, 2004 3:33pm Post subject:

If the purpose is to spot networks with netsplits, those who have them aren't going to want to play along, thus voiding the premise.

phrozen77 · Posted: Jul 13, 2004 3:45pm Post subject:

thats why it should be done "outsourced"

how much do you think it would be possible to create such a distributed info-gathering tool?

(as im not a programmer (oh well, perl, but thats not going to help i guess) im not much of a help there :/ )

katsklaw · Guru Joined: 28 Jun 2004 Posts: 1064

my idea was to lighten the load on scrawl ... nothing to do with netsplit. Razz

Sorry for the confusion.

I'm suggesting that a bot installed/connected on like say .. my net will send data to SIRC reporting user/channel data. Scrawl connects a few times aday to insure that the data reported remotely resembles the data it collects.

This allows for the same anount of reports made and less load on you.

Jason · Posted: Jul 13, 2004 4:07pm Post subject:

Sounds like a lot of work for pretty much no gain.

BTW, I actually did this when I was running a server on Undernet. I modified one of my darkbots to create a network graph, each server, with bar graphs for server clients, plus log info like netsplits, opers, etc.