[tor-bugs] #16907 [Onionoo]: Stop returning a 500 Internal Server Error when the hourly updater has not run for 6+ hours

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#16907: Stop returning a 500 Internal Server Error when the hourly updater has not
run for 6+ hours
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 Reporter:  karsten      |          Owner:
     Type:  enhancement  |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal       |      Milestone:
Component:  Onionoo      |        Version:
 Keywords:               |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:               |         Points:
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 When the hourly updater has not run for 6 hours or more, the server
 responds to all queries with a 500 Internal Server Error.  This seemed to
 be a good idea, because users would tell us when the hourly updater was
 broken and we could fix it.  But actually, it's a really bad idea, because
 there are valid cases when we need to stop the hourly updater, for
 example, for making backups.  Last night's backup took 10 hours, which is
 not really sane, but which is not a good reason to break the service for
 all clients.  I also have a Nagios check in place that warns me when the
 hourly updater stops running, so that I don't rely on poor users to find
 out when things are broken and tell me.

 The suggested change is to just serve whatever data is available,
 regardless of when it was written.  Usually, it would be less than two
 hours old.  But we might also serve 5 hours or 25 hours or 100 hours old
 data.  It would be up to clients like Atlas and Globe to warn their users
 that the displayed data is outdated.

 I'm not implementing this right now, because I want to give the Atlas and
 Globe maintainers the chance to add such warnings to their applications.
 I'd want to implement this in a month from now, if possible.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16907>
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