High number for results of project

[noedoc1]

Hi, Jeremy!
Sorry to bother you again, but I have a doubt about results storage. I’m conducting an experiment and I keep getting this email:

Our system has detected the following high number(s) concerning the results for your project named “ExpG1B” (slug EWhHDp):

The total number of lines in this results file exceeds 20,000 (total: 21224)
You may want to inspect the code and configuration of your project. You can delete results using the “…” button that appears to the right of “Results” on your project’s page. Remember to save a copy of the results in a safe place before deleting them from the farm.

I’m 95% sure everything is working well with the experiment. The problem is that it’s a self-paced reading (dashed sentence) with almost 60 items per list and I’m collecting several participants. Can I ignore this email or should I download the results file and erase it every time I get this message?

Thanks!
Noelia.

[Jeremy]

Hi Noelia,

The PCIbex Farm will only let you generate results files with 100k lines max (excluding comments lines) so my recommendation is you estimate how many participants fit in 100k lines, and you download the file and clear the results at those intervals. Just make sure you pause data collection in advance (turn off “published” on your project’s page) so you don’t get new data caught in while deleting results from the farm. Of course you can always not do that and keep collecting data, and use the “only include submissions” option to download your results in multiple batches of less than 100k lines each (maybe refresh the page each time too, if you do that)

The issue with large results files is that, the more lines the PCIbex Farm has in its database, the longer it takes to access it, resulting in longer delays for saving future incoming results and for downloading results files. We have had several crash episodes in the past related to large results files, so we try to encourage users to keep them light by limiting the number of lines logged, downloading the files regularly and deleting them once safely stored on a local device

We won’t initiate deletion of results without asking for consent. However, technical problems might cause data loss, for example if a participant loses their connection while taking your experiment, or if the server crashes or is temporarily down at the moment they send their responses (which, again, is more likely for larger data transactions, because of the memory load they incur)

Jeremy

[noedoc1]

Thanks, Jeremy! I’ll be checking and deleting the results file then to avoid any inconvenience.

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