Lanzer's work diary (features and upgrades)

[Lanzer]

The item selling bug should be fixed now, and the marketplace should re-open very soon. After a few other bug fixes the gift wrapping option will be back so we can all wrap gifts for Christmas. 3nodding

[Lanzer]

Still working on the item recovery script for those who had lost items back in September. Sorry it took so long but if all goes well the items will be returned later this afternoon.

This new system will also allow the possibility of automatic item recovery in case of any rollbacks or missing items in the future. Though almost all the bank, vending, buying/selling scripts are being re-written to ensure that there will be no missing item or duplicate items in the future.

The system also has one more function, and that is the ability to find duplicate items, even if the items are moved across different accounts. So once again, we urge everyone to report any occurance of duplicate items or gold. If we find any accounts that are abusing bugs to make gold, those accounts will be banned.

Aside from recovery work, a lot of performance fixed had been done last week. Overall the pages had been loading faster this week and soon the new session handling routine will make things run even faster. eek At the same time that the session handling routine is being re-vamped new security measures will also be in-place to prevent hacking.

[Lanzer]

After much delays, the item recovery script is finally completed. Users who lost items during the rollback or system glitch and made their report through the claim form now have their items returned as long as the item is missing within Gaia. These new scripts should allow us to be able to automate the process if there are any item or inventory loss due to bugs in the future. 3nodding

[Lanzer]

Today was the implementation of the new load balancer and also the new session handler.

The new load balancer will allow us to handle much more users, hopefully more than 40,000 users on-line, and would be more stable plus add the ability to switch to a stand by unit if something go bad with it.

The new session code will be much more efficient, with the main feature being able to allow us to keep installing more and more servers to handle more online users. Though the requirement is for the web browser to support cookies. Hope this won't be much of a problem as all the web browsers support cookies these days.

Still troubleshooting and bug testing at this point. Things should stablize very soon. 3nodding

[Lanzer]

Stacks of hard drives are being prepared for the bunch of new web servers that are installed. Hopefully they'll be ready before Christmas. That should push our web server count from 40 to 55. whee

Last night the forum database ran out of space again. eek We've reached over 100 gigabytes of messages, so for the time being many of the older messages will need to move over to another database to make space. Soon there will be a much, much bigger hard drive in place that can hold more than two terrabytes of information just for the forums.

With the new web servers having 25000 members on-line should be no problem. We're almost to the point where we can add more servers to support more users will not require changes to the software. All the development in the backend system will start to pay off pretty soon. crying

[Lanzer]

Fixed searching function for all the recently signed up users. Also re-wrote most of the code to make it fun faster.

Also brought all the avatar servers back up. Looks like there's clearly not enough servers to handle the higher bandwidth during the holidays. A lot of the background coding and structure will be re-written to avoid this problem now that the new session handler is getting stabalized.

Still configuring the load balancer at the moment...

[Lanzer]

Due to the increase of users the profile servers have been having tons of trouble keeping up with all the avatar preview and save requests. I'm working on a series of changes to the overall system to allow a queue to stack up so that even when avatar servers are tied up, everyone can still save their avatars properly. Sorry for all the downtime.

Reports had been coming in about item loss when editing trades. That will be fixed tonight also.

The guild database had went offline earlier today. Sounds like a hardware error. crying Will need to check out the server after dinner.

[Lanzer]

What was thought to be a quick little project took 6 hours to complete. ^^;;; But hopefully there won't be any red X's around the site now that this new system is in place.

The guild database is being revived, and it's time to work on trading.

(7:00pm) found some major bug in the avatar saving functions right after posting this entry. Hope to get it ironed out soon so everyone can save. sweatdrop

(2:40am) finally have things working... now it's time to work on the trading bug. ^^;;;

[Lanzer]

The trading bug is finally fixed. It's not easy to appear so it took some time to hunt it down... sweatdrop

The next project wil be back to working on backend enhancements and scalability issues. More work to ensure that we can hold a lot more users online.

Though as the housing project is coming closer to completion, more and more ideas are about to be realized with how Gaia users will be able to link each other's houses together... A ton of new features will be introduced as these ideas developed. wink Hope we can have more info for everyone soon!

[Lanzer]

Recently new users were not able to search for their post history and topics started by new users cannot be replied to. Those two bugs are now fixed. 3nodding

(1:00am) Took quite a bit of delay, but the salon is finally fixed also. whee

[Lanzer]

The Gaia Guild database had went down yet again yesterday. Looks like something is wrong with the hardware. crying

[Lanzer]

As its new years and it's difficult to replace hardware, the guild database server had been put back on-line even though it's unstable... Hope to have a replacement ready within a few days. whee

[Lanzer]

The forum database is once again running out of space. eek

A very large disk array is being ordered to handle the forum traffic, meanwhile, aside from archiving, many of the old posts will be moved to another database to free up space temporarily. It's a rather tricky task to make all the viewing and editing features work with this patched up system. Hope all works well. whee

[Lanzer]

After 12 hours of struggle the new load balancer is finally in place. crying

Sorry for the downtime earlier, but now that this new load balancer is here we should be able to handle a lot more traffic than before, and we more secure against floods and other network problems.

Another 8 web servers will be installed within a few days. wink

[Lanzer]

Yesterday a network switch went down causing service outage for about an hour. As Gaia continue to grow, more and more of our old hardware might take turns failing. So we're placing more and more focus on redundency now, making sure that when one piece of hardware goes down, there will be a backup unit that will take its place and so forth.

Yet another 10 servers are being added this week. whee Still trying to stay ahead of the large amount of traffic demand we're getting.