SER & CS & CB not working together
I've got a VPS up on Berman. Was SER & CS. Just got a CB license installed yesterday. I set CB up as a backup to CS. CS was set to 6 retries, CB to 4. I also have AskMeBot.
In roughly 20 hours I saw CS not pick up a single captcha to solve. Everything went to CB. SER seems to be bypassing CS to make CB the option of first resort. Something is messed up.
In roughly 20 hours I saw CS not pick up a single captcha to solve. Everything went to CB. SER seems to be bypassing CS to make CB the option of first resort. Something is messed up.
Comments
Why would a setting in CB determine SER's behavior? It shouldn't. If it does that is quite the bug.
10 retries overall probably isn't optimal. But I'm not using CS & CB in combination until this is fixed. I'll worry about the retry count when it is.
I have yet to see proof that CB >>> CS. Until then CB is going to wait until this bug is addressed.
This is a bug and simply saying "CB is better; use it" ain't good enough.
I did not try testing either service. I know what CS is supposed to return on a test; what is CB supposed to return?
*Maybe* CS is partially to blame. But I'm reluctant to blame it when SER & CS work just fine by themselves.
In project options make sure you have "Ask user/external service to fill captchas". Checked. If that label is reading something else, you need to click on it.
That "Communication successful" is OK as well.
And that might have made the difference. Because on my restart as mentioned a few minutes ago I once again saw the same behavior. Nothing getting to CS; everything passed to CB. I will shut everything down and bring it up again, this time with "run as webserver" unchecked in CB.
In that hour I got 80% of the verified that I got in 7 hours on just CB. I should have paid attention to the submissions as well; my bad.
So its been about 5 hours or so since I got the 3-some working right. "Run as webserver" is the culprit. Average CS solve time is 0.565. Recognition rate on CB is low, about 40%. Understandable as it ain't getting the easy ones. I didn't alter the retry numbers as I wanted a comparable baseline. The over all Verified count is lower then I expect for 5 hours, especially given what CS did by itself in an hour this morning. But again some of that is due to the retry specs.
I'll set up a more rigorous testing regime tonight.
8922 submitted 170 verified
CS 3987 solved ave time 0.522
CB 582/1188 recognized ave time 0.627
Now running CB/CS. First exercise ran 12 hrs + 1 or 2 minutes.
Anecdotally CS's speed is much better with CB as a backup. I assume that must have something to do with how SER delegates the captchas. Or maybe not.
I miss the old defrag of windows95.... it alyway comforted me.
18149 submitted 345 verified
CB 5358/7075 recognized ave time 0.267
CS 341 solved ave time 1.371
I expected CB solve time to decrease and CS to increase. The first service up gets to skim the cream, leaving the tough ones for the backup.
I hadn't really noticed until now the captcha reporting section on the stat bar. Can't make good sense of it as the balloon hint is ambiguous. It has three numbers in it at the end of this run, 8067, 1373,1244. The hint did not change no matter which number was hovered over. All 3 hints indicated "captchas sent to services <service1>".
Now running CS alone. This will run for 12 hours. Almost forgot; all exercises have been run with my AskMeBot API key enabled.
12055 submitted 227 verified
CS 5470 solved ave time 0.506
From SER's stat bar: 10821 sent to CS, 1086 to AskMeBot
CS 12 hrs
18923 submitted 379 verified
CS 5318 solved ave time 0.581
10441 captchas assigned to CS /1180 captchas assigned to AskMeBot
*Now* I'll give CB alone a run. And I won't mess it up this time.
But I'll do an update in a couple of hours at the 12 hour point.
SER says 12832 submitted, 226 verified. 8809 captchas assigned to CB, 1261 to AMB.
CB says it recognized 5959 of 7672 with avg time of 0.264.
Back to the VPS salt mines for SER & CB. The experiment will conclude tonight.