LHC@home

The last two days I have been getting the following error message:

LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:32:31 - Sending request to scheduler: http://lhcathome-sched1.cern.ch/scheduler/cgi
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:32:34 - Scheduler RPC to http://lhcathome-sched1.cern.ch/scheduler/cgi succeeded
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:32:34 - SCHEDULER_REPLY::parse(): bad first tag Content-type: text/plain
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:32:34 - Can't parse scheduler reply
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:32:34 - Deferring communication with project for 18 minutes and 16 seconds
--- - 2004-10-16 09:50:51 - Insufficient work; requesting more
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:50:51 - Requesting 4153 seconds of work
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:50:51 - Sending request to scheduler: http://lhcathome-sched1.cern.ch/scheduler/cgi
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:50:54 - Scheduler RPC to http://lhcathome-sched1.cern.ch/scheduler/cgi succeeded
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:50:54 - SCHEDULER_REPLY::parse(): bad first tag Content-type: text/plain
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:50:54 - Can't parse scheduler reply
LHC@home - 2004-10-16 09:50:54 - Deferring communication with project for 1 hours, 11 minutes, and 29 seconds

SCHEDULER_REPLY::parse(): bad first tag Content-type: text/plain

This is a message from the client saying it can't understand what the server is telling it. There is a bug in the server software that generates a malformed XML message when the database has reached its connection limit. What it should say is "Server can't contact database"

In English the message can be taken to mean that the server is very busy. This will clear after a few seconds or minutes. The LHC@Home servers are prone to this problem because of the intermittent workload - everyone is crunching until they run out of data. Then, when new results are submitted everyone piles in to get more work and the server usage goes way up. A more regular supply of work would even some of this out.

Giskard - the first telepathic robot.