On Thu, 2003-05-01 at 17:55, Richard Grevers wrote:
I thought the reason we were having this discussion was because articles were repeating too often, indicating some fault in the randomizer?
Well, two things:
First, the existing assigned indexes were very un-randomly distributed, which would may have lead to a somewhat increased chance of duplicates. I re-randomized the whole set this morning, and I just now ran 100 random pages and got no duplicates.
Second, I'm not 100% sure the randomizer is reliable under heavy load. We're running MySQL 3.23.54; I notice a line in the changelog for 3.23.56 (released in mid-March, apparently, when I wasn't looking) which may be relevent: * Better RAND() initialization for new connections.
Were we not about to replace it with a new machine and MySQL 4.0, I'd recommend trying an upgrade. :D
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)