The following item was just posted on the news crawl on the ARRL web page:

The log processing delay for Logbook of The World (LoTW) remains at approximately 60 hours, with approximately 8000 logs queued for processing. Please do not upload the same log more than once. According to ARRL IT Manager Michael Keane, K1MK, the League has implemented an interim “fast lane” for processing logs: “In order to do this, resources have been shifted from servicing interactive requests to the processing of logs. As a result, LoTW users may notice some sluggish performance. Since these changes have been put into place, the number of logs waiting to be processed has been reduced by approximately 20 percent. The expectation is that this new measure will continue to make inroads into eliminating the backlog.”

For the benefit of the Board, despite reports from uninformed individuals, the LOTW system has NOT gone down and it is operating as originally designed. The perfect storm of factors including propagation, new countries and participation in the large CQ WW contest the past weekend resulted in an unprecedented number of logs being submitted. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that, for a variety of reasons, there were an usually large percentage of duplicate logs submitted. Some of these were probably the result of the impatience of our members and, we suspect, some may be the result of certain logging programs. Almost 25% of the logs in the queue were duplicates. While they are not processed twice the server does need to go through a process to identify the log as a duplicate and discard it.

We have tweaked the processing program to prioritize log processing and this has helped the pace of processing somewhat. It will, however, slow down the response time for interactive users trying to check awards, etc. on the system.

At this point, we have done what we can. We will be reviewing the situation and looking at possible solutions as well as the cost/benefit of providing those solutions after we get past this current situation.

73,

Barry J. Shelley, N1VXY

Chief Financial Officer

ARRL, Inc.

The National Association for Amateur Radio

(860) 594-0212