A glitch was reported to us in late November, when the library noticed some negative wait times for their chat sessions. A few others then reported the same problem.
We're happy to report that our QuestionPoint developers found and fixed the problem as soon as they were aware of it. The fix is not retroactive, however, so the negative times you see will remain. The problem resulted because two of the four servers to which we direct all chat requests and librarian logins for load balancing purposes were set by a different time standard than the other two. The time difference undoubtedly also caused some wait times to have been logged as slightly longer than they actually were.
We are aware of the wait time discrepancy having begun on November 7 and occurring with greater frequency toward the end of the month. This is explainable, as we were moving, in phases, to these new servers, one at a time, over a period of 3 or 4 weeks. Because of the phased move, the various possible scenarios, and the relatively low number of negative times (1800 across the entire system, out of a total 60,664 sessions accepted), we have noted little, if any, affect on averages and trends. Correct times can always be calculated, of course, by looking at the full transcript and noting the timestamps that are displayed.
We are grateful for your reports and regret the inconvenience caused by the bug.
A very thanks to QuestionPoint developers for resolving the negative wait time issue. I found it and it was really an headache but somehow developers got resolved and it helped me.
Posted by: Shreeweb | December 14, 2009 at 11:57 AM