Nowadays tuns of people are in quarantine because of covid-19, so it increased visitors of lots of sites, including CF and caused CF' hosts to overload. So what should we do? In the time that we are bored of staying home and CF staffs(and problem setters) are doing they're best to bring us nice contests, what should we do to help them?
I know that some games' servers brought a feature that you can(if you want) use your computer as a host to help them(specially in Minecraft servers, they give you in-game items if you help them for example). I know it's a little forbidden to use this method but i think it will be much better if we could help CF that way, but it needs staffs attention to make it happen. Its a hard-to-do work but still worth it.
It can be used for example when CF servers are down, or they are overloading(it happens sometimes that lots of codes are submitted and are waiting for judgment), but sadly it will be harder to use this method in online contests, but truly a way to stop queueforces specially in system testing time after and normal times.
I believe lots of people are ready to help CF that way. Please let me know if you have any idea about how to help CF and decrease queueforces(not only after contests).
Please comment below your ideas.
If servers are the main problem, then I want to ask What did they do of the money raised by donation about $125658??
Good question, did you know that they will pay problemsetters?, i guess it was 150 dollars for a div.2 only contest and 250 dollars for a div.1 + div.2, also it was some prices for who have donated, it costs too much. Also who said they didn't spent the money for hosts?, i don't know if they did or not, but whatever they did wasn't enough, we are in a special situation so we need special solutions.
Judging machines should all have similar specs to measure the running time fairly.
That's true, i don't say it's an easy solution for the problem, i just wanted to mention that solutions exists and are needed for the situation, probable this method can be used for unofficial submissions. Or even for a pre-verdict to help people guess they're verdict.
Am i right that the must of time will be wasted for checkers? if its that way then we can run the solutions twice, one in CF servers to check time and memory limits one in unofficial hosts to check the correctness of output, it still worth it i think.
Yup, a pre-verdict can help to a certain extent. While it is true that different machines will take different times, if a solution gives a WA, it doesn't really matter which machine it was running on. This way, some amount of solutions can be eliminated, and don't even need to run on a CF server.
The actual numbers dictating whether such a strategy would help or not is something only CF admins can probably get, but at least this could be one possible method.
But in fact it would change if some undefined behavior used or just compilation options differ. Still usable.
just some compilation options differ
Umm, if anything like this even happens, it will happen with uniform compilers and options in some sort of virtual environment which all the host computers run. Anything else is not even slightly viable, IMHO.
Undefined behavior is still going to be a problem, but after all, it is undefined, and sometimes running code with UB multiple times in CF yields different results.
I see, 10 minutes waiting to get judged, its a little slow isn't it?