It was a joke, dp.

Yes, I am an experienced Developer myself. But I won't get involved in coding with you guys. I just want to organize the Use-case, implement game-theory, logic.

I am the kind of guy who would reorder my bacth queries based on the temporal information so that the read will get data from the same track. Hard drive always read the full track so you do get free read. If your hard drive head does not have to move back and for, you will get superior performance. I know about atomic operation, lock, commit, explicit lock, implicit lock and stuff. I am an expert in Cache coherency.

My style is paper and pencil. I like to draw simple diagram, my diagram is three dimension, with X, Y as two dimension while I used color as the third dimension. I believe codes are to be PRECISE and comments are to be CONCISE.

@Meep

See, I'm glad I asked.

As a developer, I'm sure you can understand the importance of maintaining, developing, and testing code. While some of your ideas would, in theory, speed up the development process, none of them touch on the real bottlenecks of this site. Remember, everyone here, including the site owner, is a volunteer. All money goes directly to maintaining the server's hardware. Having a volunteer, or a group of volunteers, develop code together gets very complicated. More challenging, however, is actually motivating volunteers to do the hard development work.

Meep - Then why not move to solid state drives? Sure they cost 3-5 times what the equivalent drive does but no seek times and incredible read times plus no moving part and greater TBF.

The project I worked on was for a self-contained Enterprise Solution for the Search Engine. We store billions and billions of webpages, solid state drives would be prohibitive. Beside, at the time I was working on that project, Flash Technology was not quite mature/optimized yet. Are the current laptops adopting SSD in wide spread yet?

People are surprisingly interested in the technical issues at play here.. :o I am more than happy to oblige.

Two things you need to know first:
- We recently moved servers partly to get more disk space (2x250GB HDDs, instead of 1x160GB)
- FreeBSD (and *nix in general) stores web logs and databases on a /var partition , which has its own space allocation

When we went to a new server a couple of weeks ago I asked the tech reinstalling the OS to put the /var partition on the second 250GB HDD. This would give plenty of space for the database, and also balance the load between the two HDDs fairly evenly.
After three hours and much agitation on my part I got through to him, and he said it would be quicker for him to just do the default install with everything on the one HDD.

The default install gives /var 8GB.. More than enough for a desktop OS or a database-light server, but for our system that's almost at capacity. (Someone mentioned the map cache etc, and although those take up a lot of space too they are on another partition)
I was planning to set up the second disk this weekend, but unfortunately our space use has been growing faster than I had thought.

The next safeguard is a script we have running which warns when any partitions are nearing capacity (as well as several other potential issues). This too was effectively disabled, because it uses a certain PHP function disk_free_space() not present on the new installation, and not yet reimplemented. This meant the disk space could go over, and the server went down.

Even then I would normally have got an e-mail within 30 minutes of when it ran out space and went down, and I got a dozen, but peak webDiplomacy time is US midday-time, which is West Australian sleep-time. The data comes in fastest when I'm zonked.

Even then the script should have started making my computer beep to wake me up, but I haven't fully tested that functionality yet. (I shelved that when the server started playing up and I had to focus on moving the server)

Even then when I woke up and restored the server the game processing script should have recognized that nothing had been processed for the last 6 hours, and that nothing should be processed until games were given more time. (I'm still not sure why this failed, I'll be investigating that this weekend)
Hopefully that more than satisfies those looking for the details. :P


So this was a major screwup, but hopefully you can see how it mostly relates to a recent server move and not having everything yet completely hooked back up. Thanks again for your patience. This weekend I'll be taking care of these issues and also deploying some changes Alderian has been working on.

Thanks, good info ..... especially the tease about the 'Alderian Changes'

You have it set up so your computer will wake you if you're sleeping and the server goes down?!
Incredible. I applaud your dedication.

Meeps - My new Sony is a dual core ultra low power i7 with 8 gig and a 256 gig SSD and touch screen running Windows 8 for about $1200. All in all a decent developer machine. And even though it is integrated, the video is still good enough to play STO, WoW, and SWTOR at medium to medium high settings.

Kestas - thanks for all you do.

I much appreciate the long post from Kestasjk. It shows dedication. I don't appreciate long posts in the Quantum Mechanics. They take up too much space on the forum.

Growing too fast, consuming diskspace faster than expected is a good problem to have. It's way better than a deserted sites where nobody play.

I propose we refer everyone to use this link to report issues:
http://www.webdiplomacy.net/forum.php?newsendtothread=997010&viewthread=997010#postbox

In side this forum, we will have two sticky restricted threads, one thread for the bug summary report, one thread for ideas, improvement, request.

In each of those threads, the first post will be the summaries, subsequent replies in side will be used to elaborate each items. The summary will list things in the priority order. These two restricted threads will be owned by a couple admin persons who read everyone else issues then make a judgement, paraphrase for clarity, concise.

If we get organized, good things will come out, propagate up. We need to exercise the wisdom of the collective.

Or we could just use the dev forum. You should poke around this website a bit more.

What is the link for the Dev forum? I am still kind new around here, getting my feet wet.

forum.webdiplomacy.net

For some reason it has been exceptionally slow to load today.

Oh yeah, I was there, and it was slow. I copied and pasted the wrong link. LoL. But I did mean to use the forum.webdiplomacy.net. (I googled a lot and can find my way around. I am a search engine expert.)

-----------------------------------------
I propose we refer everyone to use this link to report issues:
http://forum.webdiplomacy.net/viewforum.php?f=3&sid=b44ff7eac59858313046d0f7dca62c59

In side this forum, we will have two sticky restricted threads, one thread for the bug summary report, one thread for ideas, improvement, request.

In each of those threads, the first post will be the summaries, subsequent replies in side will be used to elaborate each items. The summary will list things in the priority order. These two restricted threads will be owned by a couple admin persons who read everyone else issues then make a judgement, paraphrase for clarity, concise.

If we get organized, good things will come out, propagate up. We need to exercise the wisdom of the collective.

We should come up with way to reduce incentives in cheating, thus also reduce the work to investigate. I propose:

1. You are not allowed to take over a country when it's too weak. If have seen ridiculous cases when someone took over a county with a couple SCs while the giant neighbor has more than 10 SCs.
2. When someone takes over a country, the new bet money should not be added to the pot. As far as the current players, it's just a change of player for that one country, why should the pot be sweetened?
3. We should have tier where a brand new players is not allowed to join a game with a veterans or higher ranking. You must play with xyz number of games and show credible effort before you are allowed in game with the vet. This prevents people from making quick and throw away account to help their main.

If the Dev have need for coding, I can write Algorithm for you guys to code. Clearly I am not set up nor I want to get involved in the details. But if you have a need for some algorithm, I can write Pseudo codes to help out. Perhaps I can demonstrate my competency by writing Pseudo code to resolve/process moves to impress the Devs here?

@Meep

1) How does this relate to cheating? Even a two center country can affect a game. Why should it remain in CD?

2) Agreed, but not sure it's a priority.

3) This is already handled by high-point games and password protected games. Do you think that is insufficient?

Yes, it is insufficient, put it in another way, we must not allow an experienced players to join a game with unproven accounts. I saw games with players rank top 10% and higher in game with a brand new account, me. LoL.

It's not about 2 CD or 1 CD, it's about a ratio. 2 CD can affect a game if everyone else have 3 CD. But 2 CD will not affect a game when everyone has 10 CD. In such case, 2 CDs then would be used by cheaters to tip the balance. That's not affecting the game, it's cheating.

I propose to use a ratio to calculate which country is eligible for taking over.

I'm sorry, but I really don't understand what you're saying. What does "10 CD" mean?

Oh wait, I got it wrong, replace all of my CDs with SCs. Sorry for the confusion.