Savannah update delays

Many functions on the Savannah web site affect data outside Savane database. This includes functions related to mailing list management, VCS repository creation, updating web pages, etc.

Updates to those systems may happen via cron as rarely as every 30 minutes, so changes made on the web site will appear to be live, but will not take effect until the next cron update.

In particular,

  • New repositories are created twice an hour (when the VCS is enabled on the 'Select features' page.)

  • ViewCVS never recomputes the \~4000 group list (it would consume too much resources and time to do it at each request) - but Apache2 (hence ViewCVS) is restarted daily by sysklogd. So new repositories are taken into account by ViewCVS only every 24h.

These things do work faster:

  • Group and account-related public info, member access control, email addresses, notification settings, GnuPG and SSH keys are in effect with no delay. Exception: when an account is added to a group for the first time, sv_assign_uid_gid assigns it a numerical Unix user ID every 5 minutes. In the same job, numerical group IDs are assigned to new active Savannah groups.
  • Group home pages update within a few minutes.
  • Mailing list-related requests (creation, password reset, configuration) are processed on lists.gnu.org immediately.
  • Updated email adresses of user accounts arrive at VCS servers every 10 minutes.

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