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The reputation displayed in my profile and on https://stackoverflow.com/reputation were the same for quite a while already - the changes to the reputation system worked out well. Still, something went wrong today. First I noticed that the indicator on the "reputation" tab mentioned 15 points reputation increase when I really gained 25 points:

screenshot1

screenshot2

I then checked the total reputation and there is a 10 points mismatch here as well:

screenshot3

screenshot4

I guess that triggering a reputation recalc will fix this - but this still might be a bug worth looking into. Unfortunately, I have no idea what triggered it. From what I can tell, it was an absolutely normal upvote that didn't get counted for some reason.

Edit: I'm pretty certain that my total reputation was 15434 this morning - my network profile however claims that it was 15424. So maybe the issue is with the 10 points I received yesterday, the display in the network profile doesn't show them for some reason.

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  • The network profile is only synced once every 24 hours. It is not live.
    – Oded
    May 4, 2012 at 10:54
  • @Oded: I know. Which is why I point out the mismatch for yesterday's reputation (the network profile is synced at 1 AM local time). May 4, 2012 at 10:55
  • @Oded: That's synced relatively constantly, it's done via the aggregator that relays every rep change up to a central database via redis messaging. SE may cache for a while on top of querying that database, but nowhere near a day. May 4, 2012 at 11:03
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    Its caching. Its always caching. Unless its a race condition.
    – user1228
    May 4, 2012 at 14:48

1 Answer 1

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This happens because of how Linq2SQL works, and it really, really sucks but there's little we can do about it without a major overhaul (getting off Linq2SQL for this, which we have considered, and continue to). So here's how it goes:

Let's assume you're at 100 rep before this happens, to keep it simple.

  • OP upvotes your answer, request sent to the server, in progress...
  • OP accepts your answer, request sent to server, in progress...
  • Upvote request gets your user object (100 reputation)...
  • Accept vote request gets your user object (100 reputation)...
  • Upvote passes through logic/checks, etc, determines you get 10 points... 110 reputation
  • Accept vote passes through similar logic, determines you get 15 points... 115 reputation RUH ROH
  • Upvote saves, in the form of Update Users Set Reputation = 110 Where UserId = @Id
  • Accept vote saves, in the form of Update Users Set Reputation = 115 Where UserId = @Id
  • You now have 115, not 125.

....you see where the problem is here. Since Linq does a = and we can't make Linq2SQL do a Reputation = Reputation + @delta format...last save wins in this kind of race.

The good news is that the reputation history view that tracks every change does not suffer this problem...since it's just inserting 2 rows (in there your summation of rep is what it should be). This allows us to compared, detect and fix up these race results every night, so there's a job to do that until we go nuts and rewrite how rep is saved (it would touch a lot of code).

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    So the answer is don't accept immediately after upvoting (and vice versa). :)
    – ChrisF Mod
    May 4, 2012 at 11:06
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    Ok, so there is a classical race condition and I simply didn't see it on this site before. Thank you for the detailed explanation. I made sure to put a little wait between upvoting and accepting your answer :) May 4, 2012 at 12:25
  • @WladimirPalant - yup it is a rare one (may happen on different web servers, etc), but has to happen very fast...we only see about 20-50 of these a day total last I looked a week ago. May 4, 2012 at 12:27

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