Welcome to Gaia! ::

My mom is coming for a visit tomorrow! yay!
Unfortunately though that means I'll be spending most of today running errands and cleaning house. razz So I might be a little scarce.

I'll probably keep my account on though so inbetween vacuuming and stuff I can run to the computer and stake someone! LOL

nope! Well, unless not having the time or energy to devote any real play time to gaia is a problem!

Help!!!!!! I bought this long hair for my vampire look. I thought it would be like an equipable wig where i could take it on and off as I like. Now I wanna just go back to my normal good ol joe hair and i dont know how to! Please someone PM me if you know how to fix it back! I tried to go back to the saloon to buy my regular hair back ... but they don't have it gonk !!!!

The shops are down. sad

Well, based on the Q&A forum, they're working on the problem, but they're not even hinting at an ETA. sad

But, I'm happy because the Veil I sent to the mule who's almost a Slayer (and will be before I sleep, I hope!) finally showed up, thanks to a helpful Mod! biggrin heart

Raj, just an FYI, some people are reporting that banging on their refresh key, they can occasionally get a shop to load. If it loads, they can actually buy things... I used that trick to check the price of something in the Marketplace, too. (It's been up and down, too... Along with the Event, Shops, Towns, and Cash Shop, at the least...)

Well... When you think about it, their infrastructure is coping quite well! Let's say that 150K users are online at once (it may happen in the next couple of days!)... Let's figure out just how much of a strain we're doing to that equipment...

And due to usage patterns, they're averaging downloading one page every 3 seconds, and each page is made up of 90 "objects" and 60 database calls... (Those page-per-second numbers are probably in the ballpark of reality during peak periods, and I base the "objects" on the Flash bits and images I've seen; many pages have more! And the database calls is probably quite a bit more than "conservative"... I'd be unsurprised to hear them say that they make 250 or more queries and a couple dozen transactional writes, per page load.)

So, every second during peak times, we're requesting 30 images/bits of Flash (most of which are dynamically-generated to some degree), and making 20 database calls. Each of us. That's 4 and a half MILLION objects per second, 3 million database calls per second, and 50,000 web pages per second. That's a LOT of data!

Extrapolate that out to an hour. That makes the "Billions Served" by McDonald's look like nothing. I can practically guarantee you that your desktop PC would puke under that kind of pressure. It'd probably run off with that cute lamp on the desk in the middle of the night and you'd never see either of them again.

Gaia's stated that they have multiple servers. And they can't afford to just keep adding more without more cash coming in. (Besides the initial investment of sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, they use electricity and need a big network connection pipe...) That's why they're pushing Gaia Cash, most likely. biggrin

And they have multiple teams working on things at once. That's why we saw this massive event (which is realistically a few sub-events), Gaia Cash Shop, and a few other smaller things all at once. There's no way to possibly test all of the interactions that thousands of users poking at the site at once will bring out. It's like the monkeys and Shakespeare's works. We're the monkeys. We'll find a way to randomly do anything! wink

Their beta test group is probably in the realm of a few hundred users. The problem is that those few hundred users can't possibly strain the system in the same ways that we can, in the scale that we as a whole can. The only way to know what the result will be, really, is to push it out and see what breaks. Then pull it back to fix it. Repeat as necessary, while trying to inconvenience users as little as possible. That's pretty much what I observed with the Cash Shop. It certainly wasn't out long!

And keep in mind that the massive amounts of data transfer that I gave above ignore the really heavy users like Towns and Cinemas. I don't even WANT to think about the horsepower that those probably require.

Considering how many people a day poke at Gaia, most with little-to-no ill effect, I'd say they're doing a terrific job. A hell of a lot better than big companies like SOE and Blizzard... wink About all we can really do is to provide constructive feedback to the Gaia team and support them whatever ways we can. Be it monetary or just helping out in the Q&A forum when everyone freaks out about a glitch.

Of course, it's frustrating. But Gaia's evolving. If we fight it, the game world just won't be fun. sad

In actuality, it's not all that different than your local theme park. The same testing concepts come into play, for example. They run a new ride through all sorts of automated tests, the government tests and makes sure it's fine, they test-ride it over and over to work out glitches, and so on. Then, they let small groups try it out to make sure the ride works for more than an hour or two on end. They open the ride a few days before the "official" opening to put it under a stress test and close it down when they find flaws (it's running too fast here, it's not going fast enough there...). Then, opening day. A line stretches out the park. The ride works great for 3-4 hours (kinda like Gaia and a new bit of functionality, almost!), but then things start running a bit "off". The more they run it, the more "off" the ride gets. So they have to send everyone off while they figure it out. If they're lucky, the ride's open again in 15 minutes. If not... well, it might be a couple days... Repeat until you forget it's there.

Then, one day, as it's a popular ride, there's a long line as always. Then the ride starts acting up again. After a while, people start using other rides, some of which don't get THAT much use very often. These other rides start to break, too. Everyone at the park's working frantically to fix the problems, and trying to not scare the customers too much. Eventually, they get everything working, piece by piece, and life goes on.

Sure there's a cascading effect that annoys a LOT of people in that general vicinity during that time. But, people elsewhere don't notice it at all. For example, they're off in Kiddie Land, or eating lunch, or buying postcards... Which is a decent percentage of people! If things are fixed before they finish up, people will ask them about the problems and they'll shrug and say that they didn't know there were any right then.

Some parks (especially Disney-owned) are great about hiding those problems (e.g. By making ride wait times longer than the park hours... I've been the victim of this particular scam and it pissed me off...). Others aren't so good. If Gaia were a theme park, I think they'd be smack-dab in the middle. Not a bad place at all. You have customers aware that they're in a state of fantasy and that it's tempered by reality, and you don't lose their trust by disillusioning them.

In many, many ways Gaia and theme parks are alike. And Gaia's doing a great job with keeping a fine balance between: low park entry fees (as low as free!), infrastructure (instead of bathrooms, servers), feedback (not enough to scare people off, and not too much so as to gain false hope), new "rides" (events and site features), and "up-sells" (Gaia Cash and Collectibles). And they do it on a tight staff with a shoestring budget, working constantly to try to maintain the state of illusion for their customers.

I applaud them for this. While the glitches and short bits of downtime (this morning really sucked tho) are annoying, they smooth themselves out and it's only the people who sit at the same "rides" constantly who see most of the problems.

I'm not trying to come down on your criticism/complaint. It's wholly well-founded. I've seen lots of paranoia of "Gaia won't last through the year at this rate!" sort of stuff the past day or so. I suspect that in a day or so, people will stop pounding the Halloween event and the new Store so hard, and things will get better, quick. And the team will be able to look back and figure out how to fix things for next time.

The only way to learn is by experience. And Gaia's got a lot of that, and more to come...

And I've worked on systems which have to handle millions of page hits and corresponding database calls and computations. It's harder than rocket science! (Not much of an exaggeration, in many respects...) For example, writing code that you can't ever test at taking longer than a tenth of a second to complete. But, in the real world, it can take 30-60 seconds or more! There's just no way to know that it's going to happen.

And it will always happen when no one is around to fix it right away, and it won't show up until the same night as you release something big. And it will take a lot of digging to figure out just why this is happening to .001% of users and, more importantly, why it ends up impacting 75% of them.

I don't envy the Gaia team, because I understand the massive challenges they're up against. But I still want everything to always work! wink

Anyhow, I'm rambling way too long! Hopefully someone gained a bit of insight into why Gaia's being "so glitchy" right now. Just let Gaia know that you care and understand, and everything oughta work out just right in the end! heart

Thanks Matt.
I often see negative posts about Gaia, and it's good to see a positive one every once in a while.

When Gaia says multiple servers, how many are we talking about?