Ohloh CVS activity seems to be going berserk

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Martin Dougiamas

over 3 years ago

Hi,

Our anonymous CVS service at sourceforge (for the Moodle project) was closed due to rampant activity, and it was only after we set up our own mirrors (and thus had our own stats) that we discovered that the culprit was probably ohloh.net.

We have around 80,000 accesses to the repository from ohloh in the past 20 days. (See http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDLSITE-182 for details)

Is that normal or has some server process gone beserk?

Let us know if we can help to make this process more efficient. We love the stats ohloh.net provides - thank you!

Cheers, Martin

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Jason Allen

over 3 years ago

Hi Martin,

Sorry to hear about these problems. I've been out of town for a few days so I might be out of the loop - I'm sure Robin will pipe in if that's the case.

I can understand a reasonable amount of activity on the uk.cvs.moodle.org CVS server. Nicolas changed moodle to point at this server on May 5th - so Ohloh had to fetch the entire history of moodle from scratch. However it sounds like the problem is actually regarding the cvs service on SF (which I believe means anything to do with moodle.cvs.sourceforge.net - right?).

As it stands there is only 1 Ohloh project pointing at that location - Moodle Contrib. However I was unable to find anything unusual about that project's history that might have caused this - so I'll have to chat with Robin tomorrow to see if there was anything unual he might recall on his end.

Meanwhile I can confirm that we're not actively pulling (or trying to pull) anything from moodle.cvs.sourceforge.net. We'll update this thread with anything new we find as we continue to investigate.

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Martin Dougiamas

over 3 years ago

Thanks, Jason!

Just to clear up the timeline a bit:

  1. Four weeks ago Sourceforge pulled our anonymous access completely, citing "excessive usage".
  2. Within days we set up several anonymous mirror sites to compensate.
  3. Three weeks ago Nicolas switched "Moodle" on ohloh.net to use one of the mirror sites (UK)
  4. Since then we've had the 80,000 accesses from ohloh.net to that mirror site
  5. Just now I switched "Moodle (contrib)" on ohloh.net to use the same mirror site (UK)
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Jason Allen

over 3 years ago

Thanks Martin,

Your timeline is extremely helpful. We are still investigating what might have happened 4+ weeks ago that would cause SF to stop anon access. While 80k accesses seems a little high, it's within the right range. This is because, by default, a CVS repository is not 'cloneable'. Therefore, the only way Ohloh can get the full history is to check out Moodle at version 1 and incrementally apply every commit, 1 by 1. Since Moodle shows ~28k commits, we'd have to make at least 28k CVS requests to apply each patch sequentially.

I am not sure how you are counting 80k accesses - is it the number of tcp connections?

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