Chris, the freebie utility to find games which lots of people have score ties on is not working, i think.

http://marp.retrogames.com/index.cgi?mode=freebies

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Answers

The problem seems to be that it's trying to do too much work. The retrogames.com server used to be troubled by run-away CGI scripts written by incompetent programmers (I was on holiday at the time) which would get them selves into infinite loops and bring the server to its knees. The solution was to automatically kill and CGI job which takes more than a certain amount of real and/or cpu time. Like the 'freebies' job. It's a long job to search the database for ties, I guess - longer than we're allowed. (You'll notice the these's quite a delay before you see the error page, don't you?)

I guess I'll have to rewrite it efficiently, or something!

Watch this space.

Chris.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001