January Cook-Off 2015 Issue

We are sorry.

This could have been the best Cook-Off ever on CodeChef. The problems were that good and we had the highest participation ever. And we made a mess of it. We suspect it was recently added feature (subtask solutions being shown independently) that fired some expensive queries which made the load on MySQL shoot up! We have taken down the feature and the site is running normally now. But it took us a lot of time to do this. We will further investigate the issue and inform you the details of what went wrong.

We are embarrassed today. And we feel very sorry for the efforts of the problem setter and the tester and the contest admin who toiled so hard to bring this contest to you. We also feel sorry that your time that has been wasted.

We know this is not the first time that we have goofed up. We will correct this and try and make sure that this is the last such experience for all of you. And we still hope that you enjoyed the problems.

3 Likes

Please make this contest unrated to make it fair for everyone.

3 Likes

No, it wasn’t the subtask showing, or anything related to submitting. Proof: the site went down just from problems being opened. High participation causes high server load.

It’s the same thing as always, the site can’t handle this number of participants.

2 Likes

How is that gonna be fair?

3 Likes

We didn’t waste time. We used it for building logic, you see. :stuck_out_tongue:
Thanks CodeChef! :slight_smile:

2 Likes

some of us were able to get the problems 1st,where I didn’t get it even after 1 hour. It took 2 hours to stable the site. It was stable,I did submit the code and again bad gateway. So I wasn’t even able to know whether my code AC or not. And I didn’t even have the problem statements on that moment,where some of us already had more than 2 AC. So I think this is quite unfair. Rest is up to the codechef authority.

1 Like