Last modified: 2009-07-21 12:47:09 UTC
The licensing update poll had 17000+ ballots certified. Each ballot generated an encrypted block approximately 1.8 kB in size. This resulted in a 30 MB vote dump that timed out repeatedly both on attempts to download and upload. This could be avoided by taking steps such as using php's set_execution_time to limit the possibility of timeouts during this process. Another possibility for download is to generate the file, save it to local disk, and then present a link to that file so the download isn't done in a script. Admittedly most ballots may have much lower participation, so this may not be a frequent problem.
Reference to "set_execution_time" should be "set_time_limit". Also note that a solution to this might be relevant to the solution to bug 18974; however, it is possible to address the data processing issues without addressing the file size issues or vice versa. In particular, 18974 is likely to crop up even with much lower vote totals such that the condition described here is not a problem.
The command-line dumping and tallying system as of r53591 should be able to handle elections of any size, providing you're patient enough. Marking fixed.
