GWJ bugs, feature requests, and updates

I'm seeing a new behaviour on the forums these last few days where updated posts show up as "new". Just trying to figure out whether it was there before and I never noticed it, or it really is a new tweak - still conflicted on whether I like it or not.

avggeek wrote:

I'm seeing a new behaviour on the forums these last few days where updated posts show up as "new". Just trying to figure out whether it was there before and I never noticed it, or it really is a new tweak - still conflicted on whether I like it or not.

That's been there for a long time. It's just a bit hard to catch in the wild, if someone makes a new post subsequently.

Yeah, it's done that like, forever. And I'm one of the key offenders; my apologies.

Tanglebones wrote:

That's been there for a long time. It's just a bit hard to catch in the wild, if someone makes a new post subsequently.

Malor wrote:

Yeah, it's done that like, forever. And I'm one of the key offenders; my apologies.

Thanks for clearing that up. Malor - it's quite possible I noticed it first in the Build-my-PC catch-all thread

Feature request: get the site to stop crashing. Assignee: Doogiemac.

Ouch, all of my 'last read' markers on threads were set back about a month. Pretty painful.

It's not just you, same for me. I was a bit surprised to see 500 new posts in the Video Games Deals--- until I realized that was not correct.

Yeah, sorry guys. A result of the recent site issues. Looks like we were being pretty heavily hit by some bot in Russia. Didn't appear to cause any issues other than a flood of requests that polluted the history table, which is where we track which posts you've read.

doogiemac wrote:

Yeah, sorry guys. A result of the recent site issues. Looks like we were being pretty heavily hit by some bot in Russia. Didn't appear to cause any issues other than a flood of requests that polluted the history table, which is where we track which posts you've read.

doggiemac... We had a problem like this at one point here. We ended up blocking at the firewall 4 subnets from china and one from russia. It solved 99% of all the problems!

Malor wrote:

And I'm one of the key offenders

You are always one of the offenders

You are always one of the offenders

Hey, that deodorant stuff is bad for you, man.

doogiemac wrote:

Yeah, sorry guys. A result of the recent site issues. Looks like we were being pretty heavily hit by some bot in Russia. Didn't appear to cause any issues other than a flood of requests that polluted the history table, which is where we track which posts you've read.

Whew, glad it's not just me.
Keep up the good work!

Found an oddity (that happened since the outage yesterday). In the Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet thread, the OP and first few posts are dated 2008. One of them makes reference to Limbo coming out "last year", but Limbo came out in 2010, not 2007

Pretty sure those first few posts are probably from 2011.

Jeff-66 wrote:

Found an oddity (that happened since the outage yesterday). In the Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet thread, the OP and first few posts are dated 2008. One of them makes reference to Limbo coming out "last year", but Limbo came out in 2010, not 2007

Pretty sure those first few posts are probably from 2011.

actually it said the trailer for an unnamed game came out a year or two before, and the response was that the trailer was for Limbo.. It is entirely possible that a trailer for Limbo came out 3 or 4 years before the game released.

For those that care or pay attention to this sort of thing, I did some maintenance on the site tonight that I'm hoping will improve overall stability of the server. If you notice issues, please let me know.

doogiemac wrote:

For those that care or pay attention to this sort of thing, I did some maintenance on the site tonight that I'm hoping will improve overall stability of the server. If you notice issues, please let me know.

Will do captain!

doogiemac wrote:

For those that care or pay attention to this sort of thing, I did some maintenance on the site tonight that I'm hoping will improve overall stability of the server. If you notice issues, please let me know.

I noticed an issue recently. It crashed again.

Nosferatu wrote:
Jeff-66 wrote:

Found an oddity (that happened since the outage yesterday). In the Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet thread, the OP and first few posts are dated 2008. One of them makes reference to Limbo coming out "last year", but Limbo came out in 2010, not 2007

Pretty sure those first few posts are probably from 2011.

actually it said the trailer for an unnamed game came out a year or two before, and the response was that the trailer was for Limbo.. It is entirely possible that a trailer for Limbo came out 3 or 4 years before the game released.

It took them 4 years to make a 2D game that lasts 2 hours? Odd, but ok. Same for the OP, it mentions ITSP, 3 years before release. I wouldn't have thought those type games would take that long.

Scratched wrote:
doogiemac wrote:

For those that care or pay attention to this sort of thing, I did some maintenance on the site tonight that I'm hoping will improve overall stability of the server. If you notice issues, please let me know.

I noticed an issue recently. It crashed again.

Yeah, had a power outage at the hosting facility this morning. Bad timing... or could just be that I put too much awesome into the servers and overloaded a breaker.

By the way, I've setup a new Twitter account for general site info: http://twitter.com/gwjops

Something is really screwy. I'm getting back random blank pages instead of normal navigation results, and the screen when I posted a message just now was completely bizarre. It didn't show the thread properly.... the surrounding information was all there, but the thread itself was absent, like the query failed to return any records.

It looks like the SQL server is overloaded somehow.

In this brave new world of smartphones and tablets (capacitive touch screens, basically!), is there any chance of changing the layout of the My Account/Inbox/Recent Posts/Logout buttons on the top left under the username?

I keep logging out when I to try to hit recent posts, thanks to fat fingers!

spider_j wrote:

In this brave new world of smartphones and tablets (capacitive touch screens, basically!), is there any chance of changing the layout of the My Account/Inbox/Recent Posts/Logout buttons on the top left under the username?

I keep logging out when I to try to hit recent posts, thanks to fat fingers!

And larger font for the mobile site, too. I'd refer to be able to use Tapatalk, but a larger font would go long ways to making it easier to read on my phone.

doogiemac wrote:

By the way, I've setup a new Twitter account for general site info: http://twitter.com/gwjops

I guess it depends on the severity of the error as to whether the whole server is screwed up, but would it be possible to have a static "GWJ is temporarily down" page instead of nothing?

So apparently the maintenance I performed last night hasn't helped things much (in fact, we're quite a bit slower). Tonight I'll roll those changes back while I investigate other options.

I didn't know about the power outage... the thought occurs that maybe the load was just super-high, because you'd been down awhile, and people were catching up. It seems quite good right now.

Malor wrote:

I didn't know about the power outage... the thought occurs that maybe the load was just super-high, because you'd been down awhile, and people were catching up. It seems quite good right now.

Yeah, site has intermittent performance issues right now. The maintenance I did last night converted the database tables to a new format, which should have increased stability (which it probably did), but it should not have caused this much slowdown.

Yeah, it's gotten slow again. Hmm. I wonder if your new tables are just using more RAM than the old ones? The way the site speeds up and slows down feels kind of like it's hitting swap.

Malor wrote:

Yeah, it's gotten slow again. Hmm. I wonder if your new tables are just using more RAM than the old ones? The way the site speeds up and slows down feels kind of like it's hitting swap.

That's what's so strange... not swapping at all. For now, I've gone back to MyISAM (the change I made last night was to switch to InnoDB), and we seem to be snappy again. Trouble is that MyISAM is less stable and prone to crashing. I'm guessing there may be a deeper issue, e.g. physical hardware on the server. We're on a VPS, so I can't directly see what's happening there. The other issue is that InnoDB is inherently slower, particularly when you get to a scale of data we have in a couple of our tables. Goodjers are chatty

Might look at changing over the most active tables a few at a time. Also, may want to re-analyze the indexes to see if any improvements can be made.