its a wonder
we even qualifided for a virtual football comp....
joke alert because our national team is one !!!
UK freesheet newspaper Metro has temporarily suspended its Euro 2008 fantasy football competition. Technical problems that earlier forced Metro's game provider SilentManager to drop the mini-league feature and restricted competitors to emailing in team changes have now brought proceedings to a temporary halt. The site has been …
"Our guess is that with Metro being such a high quality, high spending organisation that the whole competition is running on a single PC held together by rubber bands in the corner of the office. Probably the same PC that hosts the accounting, advertising and payroll systems," rants Reg reader Colin.
Probably a 486?
I reckon, if this was designed by a junior programmer (as cheap solutions often are), you've got a problem with exponential growth here.
It all works great with 2 matches and results, testing shows it to be the fastest software in the world, ever, on the 486 in the corner. Sure, nobody audited the code, but look, see how fast it is! Business Agility! Those IT guys wanted a lot more for this than my nephew did! etc etc.
However, people use it, and so each set of nested loops (and page locks and other system heavy constructs) starts to grow as it calculates all the permutations for the ranking and ordering of datasets according to the game. The loops grow from just test data (say n records - n^2 permutations) with growth x: (n+x)^2
So, if the initial dataset is 10 records 10^2 = 100 loops, system performs well.
Add 10 real user records, that's 400 loops
add 50 real records, that's 3,600 loops
Just to get a ranking. For each person that tries to view the page. And if a page is loading slowly, hit refresh, and make it do the looping all over again. Just a hunch, that's how these things rather often collapse into themselves, anyway.
We have terminated our contract with the company who provided the software and apologise for any slowness or inconvenience any of our users received.
We have partnered with GFM who provide the software that runs the Telegraph's Fantasy Football solution so promise a much better experience for our premier league game.
Metro