minor changes

Blink · December 17, 2010, 02:58:53 PM

It looks like the shoutbox is the reason for the site lag on tournament days when we have 150 people on the website.

Until I can find a replacement shoutbox that can do the following:

1) auto use the site's usernames without requiring login
2) allow guests to view
3) allow multiple instances without having extra names (Blink1, Blink2, Bilnk3)
4) not easily hacked/spoofed (change your name to someone else)
5) turn off/hide the userlist so that it can fit in the current shoutbox spot

I'll be disabling auto refresh for GUESTS. Guests can't type in the shoutbox anyways, and during the tournament we have a ton of guests who just want to watch the stream but the shoutbox keeps downloading information to them.

Members will not notice any change. Hopefully this will fix the lag.

Rosti_LFC · December 17, 2010, 03:45:43 PM

From personal experience running a site with a shoutbox, I think you'll find that the vast majority of server problems, whether the tournament is running or not, are probably caused by it.

What's the current refresh rate for members? Can it not be brought down a little bit. It's not like people need it to be completely real-time; it's a shoutbox not a chat room.

xlro · December 17, 2010, 03:57:47 PM

agreed, the forum often lags heavily (i.e. the apache respond time is way too long, or even times out) during peek hours, extra tournament visitors or not (ofc they dont help)
the php module (or at least how the shoutbox is implemented) is just not made for such "real-time" applications (as u misuse it atm), when u hit a certain amount of connections / load.
The fix you thought of is pbbly a practical very short term idea, but definitely not a solution, since the site will surely grow larger and larger in the future. :)

assuming from your very specific restriction points, you just haven't found a suitable java/flash irc plugin that fits your needs. the problem with free nicks, which are not directly bound to the user, could be fixed by running an own ircd on the hd server, with special user mangement (which also only allows authenticated connections).
I think we should be able to transfer that to a real chat, which is how the box is used now anyway - it's not really a shoutbox anymore, with short converesations, but ppl keep chatting away for hours even (and therefore more or less expect real-time behavior by now)

Wojtek · December 17, 2010, 04:10:46 PM

Quote from: Blink
I'll be disabling auto refresh for GUESTS. Guests can't type in the shoutbox anyways, and during the tournament we have a ton of guests who just want to watch the stream but the shoutbox keeps downloading information to them.

Members will not notice any change. Hopefully this will fix the lag.

this is not enough.

Blink · December 17, 2010, 04:14:14 PM

As mentioned before, this is until I can find a good replacement with features listed above.

It's only a temporary fix for now.

So far the closest thing I've found and tested is a Flash chatroom script. It doesn't allow guests to view however, and it logs you out if you open the HD main page more than once since it detects multiple connections from the same IP.

xlro · December 17, 2010, 04:34:12 PM

giving guests random guest IDs should be no problem from a scripting standpoint? since I assume it has auto login that you pass to the flash anyway, since you mentioned nothing about manual logins
we could code that random guest ID thing probably in 10 minutes in php if you don't know how to.

the importance of the requirement that you can have multiple instances in multiple windows I don't really share presonally, I think its perfectly fine if one window disables the chat when you login from another window, and normal behavior people would expect from a chat to be honest
it's really just a nice optional feature (depending if you find this even useful or not, I personally don't because having the main page open multiple times makes no sense to me), which is certainly outweighed by the server load improvements by a mile.

lmartins · December 17, 2010, 04:52:42 PM

Quote from: Blink
It looks like the shoutbox is the reason for the site lag on tournament days when we have 150 people on the website.

Until I can find a replacement shoutbox that can do the following:

1) auto use the site's usernames without requiring login
2) allow guests to view
3) allow multiple instances without having extra names (Blink1, Blink2, Bilnk3)
4) not easily hacked/spoofed (change your name to someone else)
5) turn off/hide the userlist so that it can fit in the current shoutbox spot

I'll be disabling auto refresh for GUESTS. Guests can't type in the shoutbox anyways, and during the tournament we have a ton of guests who just want to watch the stream but the shoutbox keeps downloading information to them.

Members will not notice any change. Hopefully this will fix the lag.

why do guests need to view the shoutbox to begin with?

tepples · December 17, 2010, 04:54:19 PM

There's a web-based chat application called qwebirc, which runs on Python and Twisted. Freenode uses it. You might want to check it out.

meow · December 18, 2010, 12:06:06 AM

we should have an irc channel... those of us that use irc can use whichever client and the rest can use some browser based client

only problem is that nicknames aren't linked, but i think ease of chatting outweighs that.

xlro · December 18, 2010, 02:15:03 AM

I joined #harddrop on quakenet couple days ago with my bnc.
I suggest using it for now, i.e. for all the peeps, who are on irc anyway.

Quakenet also has a nice webinterface (which actually uses the mentioned qwebirc), if ppl wanna chat without an irc client:
http://webchat.quakenet.org/

Rosti_LFC · December 18, 2010, 03:25:00 AM

Quakenet is probably the most convenient given #tc etc, but man I dislike quakenet as an IRC server :\

Blink · January 11, 2011, 06:12:46 PM

Sorry guys, looks like I broke the server for the past 18 hours while updating the following:

Code Select

MYSQL Server to the latest version
PHP to the latest version
Apache webserver to the latest version
Linux kernel to the latest version
Mediawiki to the latest version
Added "Teams" section to forums.

I think that the linux kernel update is the culprit and broke some stuff + caused the downtime. I haven't been home all day so that's why the server was down for so long. Looks like we're back and somewhat stable now, but if it starts lagging really badly bear with it while I try to figure out what's wrong.

EDIT**

added new stats lookup button on main page
added TF stat lookup tool courtesy of Dr. Pete: http://harddrop.com/stats
added a new forum: Teams section and moved appropriate threads in there.

Blink · January 14, 2011, 05:42:37 PM

Downgraded back to previous versions, one or more of those mentioned updates from a few days ago was causing some problems. I'll just leave things as is unless a problem comes up.

Sorry, I figured updating to latest versions would be good for performance/security but apparently on linux they tend to break things.

Lesson learned.

Blink · January 21, 2011, 01:09:09 AM

Updated Fumen to 1.10f2. This version adds support to convert to wiki diagram code (Thanks Mihys for implementing and chopin for feature suggestion!!).

Blink · January 28, 2011, 02:06:12 PM

I wiped the ladder and removed the ladder button due to inactivity. Most gaming ladders tend to die out, but this time it was more of my fault. I haven't been maintaining it and penalizing inactive players because the ladder doesn't have a lot of functionality yet. It was a work in progress and the coder disappeared, so alot of things had to be done manually which I don't have time for. It can still be reached at that harddrop.com/ladder page but for now it's sort of hidden. Maybe one day it can get updated with some nice features and become more automated, then I'll try again with a prize or something.