Hello, Codeforces.
Unfortunately, we have to declare the round unrated.
Absolutely, these are not issues of the side of Codeforces code, but rather it is a hardware issue. Probably, electricity, power unit or something else. This led to unexpected repeated reboots of the server with the database. I hope that we will be able to quickly deal with this.
We apologize to the writers of the round and its participants.
P.S. Please, do not downvote the round announcement: the writers are not to blame for what happened. And in general, this time it is difficult to blame someone. Sometimes hardware fails.
Mike.
Have you considered migrating to the cloud? Perhaps it would be too expensive?
I think if that is the problem they can easily ask people in codeforces to donate money as much as they want and then there may be stored good money (or may be I am wrong because maybe it needs much money during the year)
Of course, this will cost many times more. In addition, similar problems occur in data centers too.
In this case, what I and geranazavr555 are doing at the current time would help. Just a couple of days ago, he took from a delivery point an adapter so that it would be possible to add fast disks to another server. After some time, we will have a fully functional slave, to which we can switch in case of failure of the main server. Now it is, but it will not handle the huge load of the round (it is needed for backups).
You are walking on the edge here.
Hi Mike, As you might already know, cloud providers like AWS, Azure etc. provides a very good SLA. We can have our servers hosted in multiple regions so even if there is a power outage at one place, we can still serve from other regions (with little degraded experience sometimes). These servers can also handle huge loads easily by horizontal auto-scaling (except for sudden burst in load since those would require some pre vertical scaling as well). However the cost to use such infra would be obviously high.
But given that we have such a huge community of programmers now, we can try for donations. If we are able to raise enough fund to use these cloud providers for say 3 years then we can think of migrating.
One interesting problem to solve here is to come up with an approximate estimate :)
I believe tech giants and fortune companies should sponsor CodeForces. Because directly or indirectly they are getting a huge number of top-class employees from this community.
Such sponsorship is not always a good thing. It isn't uncommon for cloud service providers to initially donate their free services to open source projects (or non-profit organizations that are doing something good for the humankind). But then these cloud service providers eventually stop their sponsorship and start charging a lot of money after people get used to the service and can't easily move away. Here's one example: https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/01/freedesktoporg_migration_from_google/
Also an online judge platform may have some extra very specific requirements, which are non-typical for the other cloud users. For example, the execution time of a submitted solution has to be reproducible with a good accuracy.
The number of upvotes on this comment really show how naive some people are. Let's put yourselves as a marketing director of a big company and think of how you would convince your company to sponsor CF. It's kinda easy to spend others' money, right?
They will not do it only for their promotion. They will do it also to continue the supply chain of quality candidates. So, I don't think some sponsored round or activities which help CodeForces to raise their fund will be bad.
I don't like this. With big sponsorships come big expectations.
I would absolutely donate this site literally helped me get a job so least I'd bs thrilled to donate.
agree
It's all part of the game.
It's good that the round became unrated, since I solved only problem A))
Why you dislike me?(
because you solved only A
and how many problems did you solve?
that was just a joke. you did fine.
No problem,we trust technical team of codeforces,they are putting lots of efforts.
It's surprising to me that Codeforces still runs on an old Thinkpad in the basement. If running it off the cloud is too expensive, perhaps having a fallback on the cloud that you could turn on when there are technical issues?
Wait, this Thinkpad hosts the backend and also runs all solutions? Is that for real?
nah, its hosted on a lemon powered potato
It runs on a B360M-DS3H
This is what I found by doing
system("systeminfo | FINDSTR \"System model\"")on custom invocationis there only 1 machine that runs whole cf?
To be fair, that's more than enough. At a specific time I only see about a dozens of submissions got executed, which only take a few milliseconds of the CPU load. If you put in about 12-16 physical cores with probably 128-256GB RAM it should be able to handle the whole site without any problems. In the end this is just a very modest estimation. We're in 23rd century already, there is no need for multi-server setup to run a website or a web application.
Hey, but not all of us are time travelers from the future like you are :(
It is only a game.
It's all part of Aizen's plan
It's okay MikeMirzayanov. All the best for hosting the next round properly.
Just a suggestion, you can make rated for the participants who will be getting positive delta, and for the rest, contest can be made unrated. Everyone will be happy and also it's fine as everyone got the same time just the contest duration got reduced. Also, it's not the fault of the participants then why should they suffer?
It's only my humble opinion, but I guess it'll be unfair: imagine a 1500 rated specialist (let it be A) solving 3 problems fast and getting 1000th rank and high positive delta, and everything shuts down. Imagine if it didn't, he wouldn't have solved any more, but 3000 people with the rank below him would solve 4 problems and A would have had 4000th rank or lower, so he would've had negative delta, and you suggest that we add him rating for his performance. I know that 3000 people can't solve 4 problems, cause normally <=1500 ppl solve at least 4, but no one knows what could've happened. I'm sorry if I offended you or any specialists
No one knows what would have happened if the contest was for 2 hours. Maybe that specialist which you mentioned, may have solved even E. Making unrated for long queues is fine as in that case there is an unfair advantage to the participants who solved in one go over the participant who submitted and got a wrong answer verdict after 10 minutes. In today's case, no one has got any advantage, so it's reasonable to make it rated for participants who will be getting a positive delta and everyone will be happy.
Yes, no one knows what would have happened. The positions the participants got doesn't reflect what their actual skill levels is. For this reason I think it is better to be unrated.
You did not get whatever I was trying to convey. First, even standings at the end of any contest do not reflect their actual skill level for some users. Also, in any 2hrs contest minutes, then there must be some user who ended with a rank around 1000, could have ended up under 200, if the contest would have been extended by just 5 minutes. What I am saying that everyone got around 1hrs 15 mins, so it's reasonable to make rated for participants who will be getting a positive delta. Why should other persons bother about someone else's rating?
Because ratings will inflate overall and in my opinion it may ruin the legitimacy of ratings if we allow this to consistently happen for unrated rounds. I was thinking that taking the square root of the delta is an idea but also not really realistic.
Why are you craving so much for ratings man. Ratings indeed brings motivation but when motivation turns into greed it also brings a huge demotivations.
Also, I think it does not make sense to have positive delta without negative delta, its like yin and yang...
It would only cause rating inflation.
This happened once in a year (or maybe even more rare). so, saying blaming codeforces is not on the cloud is the reason for it seems like a big stretch to me.
if possible don't make it unrated because site crash was for everyone
I know that someone play well in this round, including me. But there is also someone who just want to submit the time the problem happened, well, also including me. It's empathetic for you to understand that there is huge difference between interruption like this and normal ending. Just imagine that the site crashed just after you finished programming your code and prepare to submit, then you can put yourself in.
Please check if some of your employees are giving contest and performed very bad so they caused some hardware issue LOL:)
Even though I performed better in this round than in others, I understand the situation and will continue to support this platform!
Can we add another Educational round by end of Jan to make up this one ??
please keep another div 2 contest before the next one if possible MikeMirzayanov
PLS, keep another contest before Codeforces Round #767 (Div. 2)
Hoping for a round before the next div2 to compensate for this one. Nice questions today.
Could you please give everyone their delta if it is positive ?
it will be kinda unfair for others cause they could have got +ve delta during the down time or something so the better choice is to make it unrated
For them, it's still unrated, and why should they bother for others' ratings?
yeah
Because of rating inflation. It's like you have money, and the state beginning to print and distribute the same currency, so that you can not buy anything. Or if everybody gets +1000 to his rating, it makes no sense.
Or another explanation. Percentil is more important than rating. Someone who has not even participated in this round, expects that his percentil will not change. Some winners will overtake him, but the same amount of participants would normally fall under his rating level. If there are only winners, it disadvantages all non-participants.
but it is unfair for people who thought it is impossible to continue for that the crash lasted a long time.
Things will be different if the problem is solved in minutes.
Goodbye my dreams of solving 3 problems in a rated contest.
I'm actually up rank, but it's ok.
me too.
and i just want to submit my D(LOL
It's all good, even though it is unfortunate, the writers are not to be blamed. Good luck to everyone in future CodeForces contests.
dompit
ah shit happens
I want to laugh and cry)
Just my opinion, but I don't think you should think about rating at all until you get to something like $$$\geq$$$ stable-mid-blue, simply because, I think until that point what's more important is to get problem-solving experience and some skill, and attaching it to rating just gets in the way of that.
Why is it different at any other rating? (also for me rating always has been one of the greatest motivations)
I think it boils down to:
1. When you hit $$$\geq$$$ stable blue, you have enough contest experience (of course, this might not always be the case) to not be too perturbed by rating loss, and (hopefully) you don't learn only stuff which "is expected to be used in Div2 C" or similar. I have seen a lot of lower rated people stuck in the loop of "I don't know $$$X$$$ because it doesn't appear in problem $$$Y$$$, and I can't solve problem $$$Y/Y+1$$$ because I don't know $$$X$$$.", or, "I solve only $$$\leq Y$$$ rated problems because I am rated $$$X$$$, and I am rated $$$X$$$ because I only solve $$$\leq Y$$$ rated problems."
2. Rating is definitely a great motivating factor! But, just my opinion, at something below stable blue (of course it's not a very strict range), it is very easy to start worrying about rating and skipping contests/using alts/similar things, or just in general, focusing more on less important things than on solving problems.
No problem! We trust the team of codeforces
What if we distribute processing power between computers based on blockchain kind of technology, with specific profiles for each kind of CPU it can work and we could track clock cycles instead of time used by a specific CPU.
HOW COME U HAVE ELECTRICITY CUT OFF, I MEAN YOU GUYS ARE RICH ENOUGH TO BUY AN INVERTER FOR SUCH POWER CUT SITUATIONS. I DO NOT MEAN TO OFFEND, IF U DON'T HAVE THAT KIND OF MONEY.
YOU CAN ASK YOUR USERS TO DONATE VERY SMALL AMOUNTS SO THAT YOU CAN BUY AN INVERTER.
MikeMirzayanov geranazavr555
AND ON TOP OF THAT THEY DIDN'T EVEN CHARGE THE LAPTOP ON WHICH THE SITE WAS RUNNING ELSE IT WOULD HAVE GIVEN A BACKUP OF A FEW HOURS ATLEAST.
Can you put a "Donate" link?
Some of us would like to help a hardware situation. This can result in a hardware renewal/duplication over some time.
If you do, you should also consider "Top donors" list similar to "Top contributors"
Codeforces is very bad (at best)!@!! I'm still waiting for updates! xD
Codeforces is loading really slow for me for past 3 days. Main reason why I couldn't take part in last div 2 round.
UPD — Working fine now :)
i just wanna say that codeforces is so slow when compared to other programming websites like hackerrank, hackerearth, atcoder and codechef. my internet connection is very fast, but when i use codeforces it takes too much time to open and when i submit any solution it also takes too much time. i am noticing this from a long time. all i wanna say is lodeforces is fucking slow.
try to improve it mikey.
But for me codeforces opens faster than other sites like codechef and atcoder ! I think this is a weird problem :|
but why does it take too much time for me?
maybe you need to change your internet or browser or connect to VPN.
but other websites like hackerrank and codechef works so slow. xd;)
-_-
i am serious bro :(
P***hub isn't a good website, Don't go to it !!!
okay, so can you suggest some good websites? XD
I can suggest you to use codeforces to solve more CP problems :p
this one is good
I guess it's partially because of CF server is in the other country for you (and CodeChef is in the same country).
You know I expected my rate to go up at this round but sadly this happened thank you Mike for fixing the problem but we wish it never happen again
Thinks like this happens.No issues :) Kudos to the writers.
ok