Brion wrote:

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:

...

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Thomas Luft wrote: The random page on the English one isn't random either. You will

regularly get

...

the same page again and again if you try a few times.

Grrr.... looks like the random indices are all off again; somehow MySQL's rand() function is biasing high the way we've been using it, and there are _very_ few articles set with lower indexes (<0.25), so those few get pulled up way too often. I've just told it to redo all the random indexes on the german wiki in a lump; I'll reset them on the English wiki later tonight when traffic is lower.

Unless you've already fixed it, the English cur_random column is still fine.

SELECT cur_random FROM cur WHERE cur_random>0.01 ORDER BY cur_random LIMIT 10

returns...

0.0100032491702617 0.010005122059961 0.010018127048405 0.0100242663268226 0.0100461980421526 0.0100568952132546 0.0100595876668204 0.0100729866047138 0.0100769354124339 0.0100776087586559

Sounds to me like you fixed the English one after I first described the cause of the problem a month ago, but you didn't fix the other languages. If in fact the English cur_random was stuffed up again, and you fixed it before I ran the above query, I want to know about it. I consider this a pet bug of mine now.

I've also gone ahead and replaced the random seed generator in the wiki and changed Special:Random to use its own random number instead of asking for one from MySQL. I don't trust MySQL anymore. :) And I took out the reset-index-on-load, which was probably trouble.

Why not just go the whole hog and use a noisy diode? ;)

I was pretty confident I worked out the problem last time around. I even wrote a little program simulating the behaviour of the previous version of Special:Randompage. It's attached. Compile it with "g++ drift_test.cc" and watch all those "random" numbers gravitate towards 1.0 like it's a hot woman at a party or something.

Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen daniel@copyleft.no wrote: <snip>

The random page on the English one isn't random either. You will regularly get the same page again and again if you try a few times.

This should have been fixed a month ago, when Brion reset the index. Have you checked since then?

-- Tim Starling.

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