Lanzer's work diary (features and upgrades)

[Lanzer]

Within a day of the network switch going down the database server for the Guild system also went down. eek Looks like we had either a bad powersupply or a bad motherboard. It's a never ending battle to keep all the servers up and running. Lucky we have a back-up unit around, so after swapping the disk drives to the spare server we're up and running again. sweatdrop

[Lanzer]

All of yesterday's effort had been spent to fix the bank. The gold glitch, and the problem with trade no able to be completed should be fixed now. I'll continue to monitor and see if things are working properly.

[Lanzer]

Added page spanning feature for trading, also addressed other problems. When you click on confirm or add gold it should register every time now. sweatdrop

Ability to edit archived posts is here now, also fixed the bug which didn't allow quoting of archived postings.

[Lanzer]

After fixing the trading bug, the page span feature (for those with lots of items in their inventory) ended up causing another bug... crying

The bug took a while to fix because the entire night was devoted towards working on the housing project. Hope things are okay again.

[Lanzer]

For the past few months there had been bugs related to the gold granting system. In particular there had been no cap placed on responding to polls.

The bug had been fixed now, and on top of that the cap to how many polls will grant gold is also changed. The main focus on the new algorithm is to allow more reward for active users and less for mule or secondary accounts.

[Lanzer]

Yesterday morning there was a database server which caused 4 hours of downtime, followed by the installation of the firewall servers which ended up taking 6 hours to install. xp Sorry for all the outages. There are still a couple of places within the site where one broken piece of hardware can cause the whole site to go down. We hope to have those single points of failures removed one by one. It mostly involve installing redundent hardware, like having two identical database server running instead of one. It's a very costly procedure, but it has to be done.

[Lanzer]

4 hours ago the new database server decided to die once again. After a few hours of checking it turns out that the hard drive that was storing everyone's inventory was bad. eek

Lucky for us the drive went down after making our daily backup, so I was able to transfer everyone's inventory data to another database.

[Lanzer]

Sunday started with the repair of the inventory database. It didn't take long until the data from the bad hard disk was retreived and the database was back on-line. Later we started working on the Valentine's Day feature but later found out that the amount of coding required was much more involved than we imagined. It took over 30 hours to finish, and just when we thought everything was over, the power went out at the ISP because we overloaded a circuit with all our new web servers. eek

36 hours later I'm finally able to sit down and have a breath of fresh air. sweatdrop There's never a dull moment at Gaia.

Because of the delay in introducing our new Hangout feature, we've instead gave everyone a Valentine event item. It's a token of our appreciation for being patient with our delayed release. The chocolate isn't really an event item though, the real event item for Feburary will be given during the Gaia Anniversary Ball. wink

[Lanzer]

The servers handling session information had been ugraded, hope that will help with the random logout issues. The bug with starting new trades at the bank had also been fixed. whee

[Lanzer]

Session servers are still being debugged right now, hoping to be able to avoid all log-off problems within this week.

Everyone is really excited about the housing release right now. sweatdrop

Meanwhile, I need to fix a few serious query problems that had been causing the site to be slow. Every little bit helps. whee

[Lanzer]

Till today the session server is still causing logout problems. crying Every minute is still placed in troubleshooting the issue and getting the database server to stop crashing. Hope to have the issue resolved soon.

The graphic servers are now sitting behind a load balancer, but unfortunately the load balancer seem to be acting up. That problem will be resolved as I spend time fixing the logout problem.

Hopefully after that I'll find the time to decorate my house. sweatdrop

[Lanzer]

The session handling database systems had been replaced once again. For now they have been working pretty solid. Looks like I can finally move on to fixing other problems. sweatdrop

[Lanzer]

The database server for the Art Arena and Link List had completely died yesterday. The most recent backup file was from March 10 so a day's worth of submitted artwork was wiped out unfortunately. crying

After this I'll continue working on the connection problem with the session databases (chocolate and pie).

[Lanzer]

After some monitoring and research, a few adjustments had been made to the session database servers to hopefully remove the critical errors that we've been getting with Pie and Chocolate.

Also an apology about the flood control problems two days ago. The changes was made to avoid forum spamming and botting.

On the development end, the township project is going pretty well. Still tons of work to be done though. We've also sat down and talked about version 2 of Gaia Housing, which will have a lot of cool features, including the ability for guilds to own their own club house. wink

[Lanzer]

The PM system was crawling throughout yesterday, as it turns out the problem was related to the fact that old messages were not being actually deleted off the database.

The operation to actually delete the old messages went through pretty well, until I found some strange corruption error which will crash the database server when accessing some parts of the database! gonk

8 hours later the database is still being repaired... hopefully I'll be done within the hour so people can use private messages again. sweatdrop