XMM-Newton-NEWS


XMM-NEWTON NEWS #15,    25-Oct-2001

ESA, XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre at
European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC)
P.O. Box - Apdo. 50727, 28080 Madrid, Spain

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Contents:

Dear Colleagues,

Many of you will undoubtedly have noted the sluggish response you received from the AO-2 RPS system as of approximately 14:00 UT on Wed. 24 October, 2001.

The problems got worse in the course of the day and eventually led to my decision to postpone the AO-2 deadline by 24 hours.

Overnight we tried to contain the situation by switching to the hot-redundant chain. This did not improve a lot. It was noted that the problem is related to the number of concurrently active users, and a test with only 50 users enabled in parallel confirmed this.

At that point I decided to remove the technical evaluation step from the submission, and also to remove the possibility to generate postscript versions of proposals. In any case we attach the final postscript forms to the e-mail confirming the successful submission of a proposal.

This has solved the problem, and as of 10:00 UT today, the system is back up and responsive. We are currently receiving 1 proposal per minute, and the system seems to behave well.

As less than 24 hours of submission time were lost, we will maintain the proposal deadline at 12:00 UT Fri. 26 October 2001.

Once again, my sincere apologies for the troubled submission process we may have put you through.


Fred Jansen
XMM-Newton Project Scientist/Manager