Index

The best way to use $QBl_{A}st$

One should use only one or two threads to submit jobs, but you can submit a new job as soon as you get back the RID from the server. If the server is sending back RID's this means that it is up, healthy, and running. Since it usually takes less than a second to send back an RID you can actually put quite a few jobs into the queue in a short period of time. Please DO NOT start 50 threads to expedite the process! Flooding the server can lead to many problems and eventually we may be forced to block access from sites which flood the severs with no warning. We strongly suggest you limit your scripts to not send a request until you receive a RID from the server. Alternatively please introduce a "sleep" command in your script which sends request no less then one once per three seconds.

Also, if you get 'Status=WAITING' when you try to get results it really means that it is waiting, the request is not lost, please do not resubmit this search again. If query is lost for some unknown reason (which happens very rarely) you would get 'Status=UNKNOWN'. In this case, stop your script and contact blast-help@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ASAP and we will look into the problem. Also if you are receiving no results from the BLAST server, do not rerun your scripts, contact us and we will investigate the matter.