Performance Boost, phase 1
 

The "Find Your Fortune" game was designed to be incredibly lightweight. Unlike the original Taskal War engine, it puts almost zero strain on the database by itself. I had expected its impact on server performance to be not much worse than the boat mini-game from the Toamna Festival.

Because of this, I was surprised to see a couple batches of error messages pop up in my e-mail.

I went researching the issue and found that the bottleneck was caused by the stuff that has to run on every page view -- loading your account information, checking your PM inbox for unread messages, et cetera -- so I started digging for things I could do to speed that up. I found a way to store that information for quicker access and spent some time today setting up the tools on the server to make it happen.

It seems to have made a difference; there were 25 active users on the site and I didn't hear any complaints, and everything seems to be running as smooth as it does during our most idle hours.

I'd like to get some feedback. Is it just me or is it running better for everyone?

For me it appears to be working better then when it was a couple hours ago. The page is loading faster and my invo is no longer lagging. So for me it is now working better.

The site has been slightly better then usual...
I just thought my iPod was just working better..

Everything seems to be a lot faster for me. :3
Thanks for doing what you did, Coda! :]

i can see my invo load in seconds instead of having to tab away to give it a chance to load<3 thankyou so much coda

It still takes me 10 years to load a trade, but that's not your fault. ;)
In general, the site seems to be running nicely.

I have no problems, but i'm not sure about the inventory. If something happens i'll let you know!(:

Yeah, I've also noticed trades still take time to load...but at least inventories are faster now. >w<

Lucid your trades only load that slow because you have like 50 billion items :P

I should also note in here that another performance issue we took care of, the long site down times. Has been seriously reduced. While before it could last up to 4-5 hours, now it usually lasts less than 30 minutes.

Mmm. I've noticed that too. I waited an hour for good measure, and found that I could get back on fairly fast again. :'D

@Ashy: Really? Lucid has a bajillion items? owo

Server was down for like half the morning 8 EST off and on til like 11 EST.

It wasn't down, just... really slow. I'm looking into that but I can't figure out what the heck is bogging it down.

nope didn't have any problems accessing the site.

It was on and off like the server just didn't want to let people on or load too much.

husssshhhhhhh. >.>
people with 50 billion items like to trade sometimes, too.
<.<

The site is faster but every time I try to come on the server is to busy

The server was pretty much busy for most of the day day for me, but now it seems to be back to normal and faster than ever. :3
Hopefully the amount of 'server is busy' messages can still limited for the rest of the day. >w<

Update: I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I'm blocking an incredibly aggressive search engine crawler. The bad news is that this crawler comprises 90+ of the "guests" active at any given time, so it's going to look like our activity is suddenly dropping dramatically.

My hope here is that by removing the foreign crawler that we'll be able to sustain more real activity on the site to make up for that.

For those of you who are curious, this means that we're going to stop showing up in searches from China, specifically on Baidu. Since we mostly gain new users by word of mouth, not showing up on one search engine (as long as that one search engine isn't Google) isn't going to hurt us too much.

Edit: If we have any users from mainland China who have been unintentionally caught by this firewall rule, please let me know; I'll narrow the block if it turns out this affects legitimate users.

Sounds good to me. :]

Also: What are "crawlers"? owo

And really? We have users from China on here? owo

I was actually going to ask about that Coda! XD I saw 109 ppl on at like...i don't remember, really late for it to be that many and 90 something of them were guests, I was like
'........huh.'

A crawler is a program that loads a website and follows all of the links. Search engines use these in order to know what content you have so that people can search for it. Sometimes it's called a spider. Baidu's crawler, unfortunately, is excessively aggressive. Hopefully taking out the traffic it generates will speed the site up a little more.

And yes, we might have a couple legitimate users in China. I know we have a few users in Asia, I just don't know where.

I know we have a few users from the Phillipines. You might want to make sure they aren't blocked.

I doubt we'd see trouble outside of China and Taiwan, but we'll see.

Okay! *is happy Cazzidy won't be blocked*

Its loading faster (:
No more duplicating.

The avatar thing is freezing up on me more. It's laggin out and not applying items as I change them in an out. This used to only be a problem when I used internet explorer, but now it's on firefox. I also end up having to save my avi twice in order to apply the background.

Yeah, I'm noticing that the performance gains have basically gone away. x.x The site's back down to being as slow as it was before I made the changes. I honestly don't know what's up and I'm not sure how to improve general performance. (I've got plans for the avatar editor but not the time to implement them.)

More server space could solve the problem but I am assuming the mess ups and lags are due to our growing population putting too much strain on the server.

I see. It's at times like this in which I want to be 18 so I can train my coding side and help out a tons

I thought it was because my laptop isn't loaded down with video games that it was faster.

Great job Coda! You have no idea to the extent in which you rock!

Game works just fine for me :)

Well after a week of surveillance, the site seems to crash at least 3/4 times a day for 10 minutes.
The site seems to slow down at random for some reason, but then speeds right back up for another 3/4 times a day.

Parts of the site that are slow
Sending Trade
Opening Trade menu
Sometimes opening the Avatar menu
Selling an item
The Find your fortune game sometimes slows down a tad, but it's not that bad compared to the others.

I hope this is some help

I would say it is closer to 5 or 6 times a day mostly for small amounts.

I appreciate that you want the help, but I don't really need reports; I've got automated logs that keep an eye on server health and take a snapshot of what's going on when it gets busy. Thanks though.

I appreciate that you want the help, but I don't really need reports; I've got automated logs that keep an eye on server health and take a snapshot of what's going on when it gets busy. Thanks though.