UNICOM - Capmpign is Suffering Sample Starvation
- Scott D Child
If you see the message ‘Sample Starvation’ in the WebConsole Messages, one of your active campaign(s) is suffering a sample deficit. More importantly, the INVADE Solution has taken action to try to overcome the starvation by re-requesting the sample.
The action is primarily to overcome the unreliability of the UNICOM SMS and provide a sample when you’d like it. For most campaigns, the sample comes from UNICOM when requested; for others, only a few requests are missed, but for some campaigns, requests are repeatedly ignored. When this happens, the campaign suffers substantial performance degradation and occasionally complete inertia.
The INVADE Solution’s action is to monitor the sample count to see if outstanding requests are fulfilled and, if not, to clear the count of outstanding requests and repeat the requests. This only occurs when the sample count in the campaign dwindles below critical levels for some time. When restorative action is taken, the "Starvation" message is sent to the Webconsole.
Previously, when such issues occurred, the only way to discover them was reactively by examining the invSPSS logs or SMS logs. This would only be done when a problem was reported following a critical instance. This solution allows the INVADE Solution to "workaround" the SMS failing to return any sample or any appropriate sample and to notify the admin users.
Many proximate instances of sample starvation messages for the same campaign might indicate a systemic issue with sample management for that campaign. INVADE strongly recommends that you review the SMS logs for such campaigns