I am so interested to see what gets into the "Art Charts" I cant stand the anticipation anymore, LOL. Anyone got any idea as to how long it will take for the "Art Charts" to get calculated?

Cheers,
Grant!!

We were planning on releasing the Art Charts this past Friday. However, having to devote so much unexpected time and resources to dealing with server failures and fixing unexpected problems with the new Galleries extended our timeline. I'm HOPING we can get them up and running on Wednesday. However, I'm saying my deadline for this is Friday, just to be on the safe side. Also, please you and everyone else, keep something in mind when the Art Charts come out. There is absolutely NO way to test these. It's just not possible. We're coding them to the best of our ability then putting them out there. The ONLY way to test them is in a live environment with a LARGE number of images. So the first week of Art Charts will likely be inaccurate and buggy. This is something we simply expected and can do nothing about, as we can't exactly move thousands of images to our test environment on another server. When the art charts are finally at their full potential, however, I promise you that they will be a very fun and informative addition to the Renderosity Art Galleries . N

Thankyou so much for this information! I will humbly be awaiting for their arrival!

I would also like to add that you guys are doing a really Great job! Youve been through so much...
Keep up the Excellent work!!

Cheers,
Grant

Nicholas,

No testing of the Art Charts? This sounds weird indeed. You'd need a couple of thousand images to test the Art Charts, guess that's around 1-2 Gb of data, you can't convince me that your testing environment doesn't have the free space for 2 Gb of data!

And are you sure there are no ways to set up an automated stress test? Script a couple of well-connected clients to bombard the server with requests, see how the server holds up? No unit testing?

You're right when you say that the real test is the live environment. But I cannot and will not believe that there is no way to do unit tests, regression tests and stress tests.

I do believe that you cannot thouroughly test the Art Charts before Friday, though. So the choice will be between releasing an alpha or early beta that hasn't been thoroughly tested on Friday, or postponing the release until it has passed a certain number of tests.

It's not a new dilemma, just about every software product faces the same difficulty.

It's not the stress test. No stress test is needed, really, because we won't be querying against the image table. Art Charts will be recalculated daily during a batch job process and then the results written into a separate table, small enough that stress is not a factor. What we can't test is the accuracy of the art charts. Art charts go against favorites, views, comments, vendors, etc, etc. We cannot duplicate the exactness of those responses to images in a test environment. We can do our best (and we certainly are doing so) in theory and application to ensure accuracy, but we cannot actually see HOW accurate they are until they are running in the live environment of R'osity. N

Makes sense.

Though a stress test still would be a good idea. What happens when you run that batch while the database server is under heavy load? I know MySQL in its standard configuration only uses table locks, so I expect trouble.

We are using specific query flags to force the batch job to use temporary tables to calculate. It will make recalculation much slower, but will also make it virtually undetectable to the users that are in the Galleries at the time. crosses fingers

nic, I reckon somebody has already explained what these charts will do. Is there a summary someplace for us to read?

Actually we're intentionally being rather secretive about the details. We want it to be a surprise :-). But they are basically a replacement of sorts for the Hot 20, taking a lot of different factors into consideration and with safeguards against being spoofed. I can say they will resemble Billboard charts, etc. N

BTW Nick you want me to bake some cookies and bring them with me when I come down for meeting this year :b_funny:

Hmmm I don't know how close to that it is Miss Nancy.  It will draw off member favorites like favorite images, favorite artists, etc.

place your bets!
1 chart full of Boobies!

;)

Khai, I swear you are going to be the death of me.

:lol: I don't know my favorites aren't full of boobies