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In Search of the "Perfect" Pager Rotation?

Posted by Cliff on from the time-share-beeper dept.

jSpectre asks: "At my new job the Unix SA team has increased from 5 to 7. We're trying to work out a new, rotating on-call schedule and everyone has 'perfect' but conflicting ideas. Twelve weeks on and 6 off, 25 weeks on and 10 off. I thought someone out there must have come up with the perfect formula given N number of people you could rotate through the weekdays and weekend most efficiently. My google and web searches have come up with nothing. Does anyone know of a good formula/solution? The requirements are this, we have 7 people (but the forumla should ideally apply to N people) who should rotate through the weekdays (a 24 hour period) and the weekend (a 48 hour period). There is a desginated primary and a secondary person. They should be on for a few weeks and off entirely for a few. Sound like a good thesis/research problem for someone? By the way, Google comes up with a lot of people's schedules if you search for pager rotation. Tisk tisk."

6 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. 7 people, 7 days in a week . . . by Mordant · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hmmm - maybe we're onto something . . . ;>

  2. Some of us... by infernalC · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...don't worry about pager rotations because our datacenters never have failures, you insensitive clod!

    1. Re:Some of us... by fm6 · · Score: 3, Funny

      ...don't worry about pager rotations because our bosses don't like overtime, you insensitive clod!

  3. In search of the perfect lotto number... by $exyNerdie · · Score: 5, Funny

    I want to win the Powerball® jackpot which is estimated at $250 million.
    Does anyone know of a good formula/solution? The requirements are this, I want to win this Powerball® jackpot (but the forumla should ideally apply such that out of the N times I play, I should win at least N-1 times). Sound like a good thesis/research problem for someone? By the way, Google comes up with a lot of pages if you search for lucky Powerball® numbers. Tisk tisk.

  4. best "rotation" by kasper37 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I've found that the best rotation is the everyone-gets-paged-and-if-you-don't-see-it-fixed- within-a-few-minutes-find-a-terminal rotation.

  5. This problem has already been solved. by MarkusQ · · Score: 3, Funny
    This problem has already been solved. You should be searching under more general terms (e.g. "fair scheduling algorithms") rather than problem specific terms like "pager rotation," that's all.

    For example, let's say you have N people working (and all are interchaingable, to start with). That means that each of them should be on call for K = 1000/N milliseconds out of every second (on average). Provided there are less than 500 people to be scheduled, you can accomplish this by rounding K to an integer (for the case where there are more that 500 people to be scheduled, either schedule them for one millisecond each, or go to a finer grained time-base). One important point to remember is that you must resource lock the call to the person in << K ms to avoid race conditions (which can garble text messages and result in an annoying high-pitched noise if two or more people try to return the call simultainiously and get multiplexed--

    Hot damn, my run just finished.

    G'night all...

    -- MarkusQ