After today’s experience in September Mega Cook-Off, I’m in doubt if CodeChef should/will host the Online Round of ACM-ICPC.
Issues faced by me in today’s contest:
Error 405 when i tried to submit my code.
Had to refresh the contest page several times in order to view the question.
Ranklist and number of ACs that are displayed against each problem were not updated after a certain time.
The most irritating issue - “Hold right there Sparky!!”
I think most of you faced the above issues in today’s contest. I was hoping that it will be declared as unrated. Anyway, the point which I’m trying to make is that the above issues need to be resolved ASAP so that we don’t face them in ICPC at least.
Is CodeChef planning to do something about this?
Let me know about your experience of September Mega Cook-Off.
Honestly I thought that CodeChef platform issues are in past. I didn’t participate in many CodeChef contests recently, so I don’t even know how outstandingly bad things went yesterday. I was quite shocked by what I saw yesterday It isn’t typical CodeChef situation, right?..
“Hold right there Sparky!!” is indeed the most annoying thing there, not being able to use half of the functionality of the site because of having to pass captcha every single time, with captcha getting more and more complicated and time-consuming.
Not being able to submit for 10 minutes and then not being able to get the verdict for another 10 minutes isn’t great experience either.
I feel sad for people who’d have to take part in official competition which is part of ICPC under conditions like that.
I’d suggest Codechef should host separate online preliminaries for separate regionals on different days. Or group the regionals such that there are atleast 2 preliminaries on seperate days. I’d be happy participating in 2 good contests for 2 regionals rather than participating in one terrible contest.
I was facing exactly the same problem. I had to refresh the page several times to view a problem and submit the solution. I just stopped participating because it was irritating.
Faced a similar problem in yesterday’s lunchtime also. But there was a significant improvement over cook-off. I hope Codechef will get a chance to test everything before the online round of ICPC.
What happened that day, and what have we done about it?
There was an issue with our logging service, which started logging heavily. This causes a request to last much longer than usual, as file writes are expensive. Due to requests taking too much time to get resolved, our web servers got overwhelmed by the requests, which gradually cascaded to the other parts and caused various issues in the submission page, ranklist and contest page. This caused the 405s, and outdated data in the ranklists, problems list, etc.
The other issue was the incessant Captchas which kept popping up along with the "Hold right there Sparky!!” message. As stated by many users on this post and some of the emails, this was irritating and challenging during the contest. We had to use Captcha to avoid bots. But we have now made several tweaks to this module and henceforth this should not affect our users. That is, unless someone is exploiting the system, they should never encounter the Captchas.
We are also rolling out more infrastructural changes to ensure smooth contests.
@aryanc403 Lets hope so. From what I can remember last time also during ICPC preliminary round codechef was down for about like 20 mins and the contest was extended. I hope nothing sort of that happens this year given the fact that the number of competitors is increasing at a very large rate.
@aryanc403 ur this point “No. of participants raised suddenly due to prize money declared for ACM ICPC.” doesnot make sense because one who participated in september Mega cook-off for the sake of prize money will definately going to participate in icpc online round… so no of participant in icpc online round will be more than sept Megacook-off and then again we can face same problem
It is nice to hear that you people are taking needed actions. But still in LTIME64, the important issue which was still there is pages not loading properly at the start. It really makes a huge difference between people who could see it properly and the others who are not. It usually takes 3-4 refreshes to load properly.
the loader wasn’t showing up right from the start, it took some time for the loader even to show up.
the response was a little delayed.
and hence users kept refreshing the page. we’re onto fixing both of these as well. We hope you shouldn’t be facing such an issue if there was one with you.
A general advice, refreshes don’t make any good to the users, they cause more harm than good. So please wait for some time and then refresh, if at all the page is not loading.
And what about submissions taking too much time to judge in LTIME64? I thought that this issue, in particular, would be fixed after it happened in Cookoff.
It isn’t typical CodeChef situation, right?..
