Brion wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Thomas Luft wrote:
The random page on the English one isn't random either. You will
regularly
get
the same page again and again if you try a few
times.
Grrr.... looks like the random indices are all off again; somehow MySQL's
rand() function is biasing high the way we've been using it, and there are
_very_ few articles set with lower indexes (<0.25), so those few get
pulled up way too often. I've just told it to redo all the random indexes
on the german wiki in a lump; I'll reset them on the English wiki later
tonight when traffic is lower.
Unless you've already fixed it, the English cur_random column is still fine.
SELECT cur_random FROM cur WHERE cur_random>0.01 ORDER BY cur_random LIMIT
10
returns...
0.0100032491702617
0.010005122059961
0.010018127048405
0.0100242663268226
0.0100461980421526
0.0100568952132546
0.0100595876668204
0.0100729866047138
0.0100769354124339
0.0100776087586559
Sounds to me like you fixed the English one after I first described the
cause of the problem a month ago, but you didn't fix the other languages. If
in fact the English cur_random was stuffed up again, and you fixed it before
I ran the above query, I want to know about it. I consider this a pet bug of
mine now.
I've also gone ahead and replaced the random seed
generator in the wiki
and changed Special:Random to use its own random number instead of asking
for one from MySQL. I don't trust MySQL anymore. :) And I took out the
reset-index-on-load, which was probably trouble.
Why not just go the whole hog and use a noisy diode? ;)
I was pretty confident I worked out the problem last time around. I even
wrote a little program simulating the behaviour of the previous version of
Special:Randompage. It's attached. Compile it with "g++ drift_test.cc" and
watch all those "random" numbers gravitate towards 1.0 like it's a hot woman
at a party or something.
Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen <daniel(a)copyleft.no> wrote:
<snip>
The random page on the English one isn't random
either. You will regularly
get
the same page again and again if you try a few times.
This should have been fixed a month ago, when Brion reset the index. Have
you checked since then?
-- Tim Starling.
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