Congrats!
Congrats!
Grats!
And inc another 50!
Grats! I check BG most days so it made sense to give a little donation to you guys! Roll on $5k!
Donated. I can't think of a custom title though! D:
Threw in $50.
I'm curious though, what caching solution are you guys using? Seems like a pretty beefy server requirement for a site that serves almost entirely text.
the server itself isnt that expensive, you would be surprised how much text uses up bandwidth, especially on a patch day. weaker system just throwing text out for 4-5 thousand users simply does not cut it, too much information for a database to attempt to process. if we cut things like sigs and avatars and smileys and skins and staying logged in and pms and other pretty things, yes Im sure with 2 dollars and some duct tape we could have a perfectly functional server for computers circa 1960
So "no caching" then? You don't have to get so defensive, I'm not trying to attack you or anything. I've just seen many, many people pay way too much for servers because they didn't realize how much caching could improve performance.
What's the average monthly transfer amount? Do you actually saturate the server's upload bandwidth on patch days, or is the database the bottleneck like you implied? Have you considered migrating the site to EC2 so that it can auto-scale on patch days and you don't need to pay for that level of power for the other ~360 days of the year?
wasnt being defensive just stating fact
we started using an image caching system to reduce our overall bandwidth requirements but its still new so the impact is still light so far. On patch days we turn off extra components to keep the server running full speed which reduces the bottleneck by a significant amount. We have considered migrating to a cloud based system but havent made a full decision on the choice yet. There is no way for us to know which days will be big or not based on the amount of games we support and their patch days or drama days. I believe ragn once told me that if we were balls to the wall for 2 weeks out of the month with heavy traffic we stand a high chance of going over bandwidth by a significant amount. Though that has lessened with image caching. The other costs are lisc fees for VB (which isnt free like phpbb) and random bandwidth spikes from hacking attempts and getting dossed by china.
tl:dr we are always looking for ways to lessen costs but we prefer not to lower the cost and the performance at the same time, the forums need to run at good speeds and remain as light on ads as possible. Obviously if you arent logged in you see more ads but those dont provide us with nearly enough revenue to fund the whole shebang.
BG VS CHINA
NO ITEMS
FINAL DESTINATION
GO!!!
Here's the tl;dr version:
BG servers uses Varnish for static content caching, XCache for PHP opcode caching and Memcache for database caching. The database isn't much problem as long as you give it tons of ram to reduce the locks as much as possible. It is mostly PHP that eats most of the CPU and ram to generate pages that displays "almost entirely text" and there's nothing much we can do about it unless we turn BG forums into a futaba-like board.
FYI BG uses an hair under 5TB of bandwidth per month.
I already did an analysis on EC2 in the context of MMOG hosting and the result is that it sucks ass. It costs 3 times more to have the same features as dedicated hosts, the IO on Amazon EC2 is terrible, the bandwidth cost 2-3 times more than other dedicated hosts and the auto-scale feature is barely worth it since it's pretty limited. From what I've seen EC2 is awesome if you need to deploy new servers up and down as fast as possible in a clustered environment but otherwise Cloud Computing is just the new buzzword managers like to plug every chance they get.
Thanks Ragns, that's exactly the sort of info I was interested in. Sounds like you've got everything pretty well-configured. I agree about EC2, I think it's probably only worth it if you have to deal with extreme usage peaks sometimes, and maybe BG's traffic on patch days isn't increased by a large enough factor to make it worthwhile. If you're using 5TB/month the pricing would definitely hurt, that's a lot higher than I expected.
I just made a small donation and realized the end date for the raffle entries was yesterday. =( The Moogle caps look cool!
Same, added a donation...I hadn't been on in a while and didn't realize it was that time again. Oh well for missing the raffle, lol.
raffle emails will go out tonight, the prizes are fewer than we originally anticipated, the PS2 games havent arrived and I cant get in contact with the donation list so Im taking them off the raffle for now
all emails will have a 1 week expiration date, if there hasnt been a response in 1 week I will assume the person doesnt want it and move on to another winner
winners will not be announced publicly however if they wish to come forward with pictures of their prizes or send the pictures to me to post, I can do that.
Haha I thought you were trying to time it so its on the same time as the mog bonanza draw (in 30hrs ish from now).
/spam checks email
Shit, this is like Christmas. I'm going to goto bed now and the first thing I'm going to check when I wake up is my e-mail. C'mon firefox tab, show me Gmail - Inbox (1) when I wake up!
fffffffffffff, thread subscription email FALSE ALARM
If you won the moogle hat PM me your address. Also it's not too late to choose what colour pompom you want (red/yellow)! Also, congratulations!
Sweet. Sending you a PM now Sono.