Thank you all for participating in Bayan Programming Contest 2014-2015. We honestly didn't expect to host around 2500 contestants for the Shortcut! round.
We had hosted 7 successful rounds with previous stable version of our platform, but due to major changes in it, we needed to test the new version, and that's why we planned to add the Shortcut! round as an opportunity "mainly meant to help us actively test our new contest platform".
Round Issues
Although we were prepared to face some issues, we seriously never expected to lose about 20 minutes of the contest. We were experiencing about 550 requests per second from more than 12,000 IPs! With the start of the round, the burden was increased to 700 req/sec.
We first tried to mitigate the attacks, and then we tripled our computing power by adding CPU cores as fast as we could, after which the situation became more stable.
As we've mentioned before, our official tournament starts after our warm-up round on Codeforces, and we'd like to ensure you that we'll be working hard enough to improve both our contest platform and network facilities, and make your next experience an awesome one.
Thank you once again for your your active presence in our Shortcut! round.
Results
So, congratulations to Kazuhiro Hosaka who stood on the 1st place by solving the 3rd problem (and thus owning the problemset) in the very last moments of the round, and won the direct ticket to the final event!
As we promised before, top 5 contestants will be receiving Bayan Programming Contest 2014-2015 t-shirts:
- Kazuhiro Hosaka hos.lyric
- Gennady Korotkevich tourist
- Ivan Zdomskyi ballon
- Nathan Azaria nathanajah
- Peter Bejda piob
Please add the final standings too (full one).
Thanks.
2500 contestants isn't so much considering the competition was announced here early on and serious competitions get a lot of participants. It's not even half of a typical CF round (both divisions), and there were just 3 problems and output-only format. How come your contest platform can't hold with just this many?
And there are probably going to be more in the elimination round. Considering that even after tripling the computing power, loading the site still took about half a minute for me, we might really need to brace ourselves for the rest of the competition.
"Shortcut! round is mainly meant to help us actively test our new contest platform, but since we'd like to thank all the people participating in this round"
just for test. don't worry.
What's important is that the contest platform works for the other rounds, which is unclear now, since it seems to be more of an unreadiness (for a normal number of participants) problem than a bug in the site — it might as well happen again for a similar reason. That's why we gotta brace ourselves.
We had clearly indicated that this round has been added mostly for testing purposes.
Thanks to the shortcut! and the attackers! So no worries. We will be more than ready for the next round.
550 req/s from 12,000 IPs seems like normal traffic for this contest, if you're including all hits on contest.bayan.ir. I don't think there was an attack. Time to optimize those DB queries.
Why did I get notification about Shortcut round at 3.18am local time and the round was at 6am?
I suppose that it's not a good idea to send invitation 3 hours before the round — better do it 1 day in advance.
I still can't even access the contest area — I just get a 500 error. There was not a single time, since an hour before the contest until now, when I have been able to see anything at all. And it wasn't for lack of trying.
So, you might also think about fixing that.
Where can I see the final scoreboard and problems?
how can i see the problems