Hey everyone! I'm getting frustrated with Panda crazy. I have Pandas set up for hits and they are not getting accepted. Currently I have the settings in Panda crazy set at default. I get alerts on my Hit Finder that a hit has dropped that I have a PANDA for, but it does not get accepted. I do run a lot of Pandas at one time (30-40), could that be a factor? Should I just stick to Hit Catcher or are their different optimal settings I should change my Panda Crazy to? Also if I have a Panda in BOTH Hit Catcher and Panda Crazy does that hurt or help me? Thanks in Advance.
oh god yes that's a problem It searches one job each cycle of the timer, then goes to the next one on the list at the next cycle. If your timer is set at 1 second each job will only get searched once every 30-40 seconds if you have that many running. This is the same for Hit Catcher by the way. Keep the number running to a minimum. 10 max, ideally 3-5
Holy moly this. Don't keep more than 2-3 running at a time, usually, unless you know the panda has a very long timer or think there is some value to keeping it long running. Hurt
@NicoleRenee sorry not trying to be mean but FWIW that is almost always the #1 newbie mistake when it comes to pandas. Every one you create decreases the likelihood of you catching any specific one. It's a round-robin system, so PC will try the first in the list then the next so on and so forth. Which means if you have 40 it wont retry the first one for forty seconds or so which is an eternity and you'll almost never catch anything that way
This is overly simplified so not completely technically accurate, but typing the technically accurate version would take me an hour so: You can only call mturk to request a HIT 1x/second. If you run one hit catcher it will stagger its requests with 1s in between. If you run two they cannot coordinate w/ each other, you'll end up calling mturk too much or in too soon a succession, and MTurk will stop responding/processing your requests (throw a PRE)
You'll get pres if they both fire at the same time. They're set up to be about as efficient as they can be with the number of page requests that mturk allows you. Using both at once just makes them interfere with each other instead of letting one work at max efficiency.
Thank you everyone for clarifying! I will definitely lower the Pandas I run at a time and stick to one catcher. I knew I was doing SOMETHING wrong.
The reason why I run so many PANDAs is I really enjoy CSTATs and I know they usually drop random batches throughout the day. So I added all the different CSTATs and have them going at once to try to catch one. and then I add more PANDAs of hits people drop in the daily thread/things I find and they just accumulate. If im only running 3 or 5 at a time whats a good rule of thumb as to how long to keep them on? i do normally turn off a PANDA once it catches something unless I want to go ham on a batch. Like keep it on for 10 minutes or so then move on to the next?
If you know how long the timer on the hit is you can run it just a little longer than that to see if someone lets it expire. It's not really worth it to run much past that point though. With CSATS, there's usually 1 group id that they post repeatedly and the others are less common. I don't really do them but others who do usually run a panda for that group id and just try to catch the others as they pop up. You could also try using the "search" function of Panda Crazy to catch them, http://pandacrazy.allbyjohn.com/help/jobs/search-mode, though it's less efficient than just running a panda for the group id.
