Procyon Games

The server glitches that brought things down for three hours on Wednesday have been continuing, with short interruptions on Friday and today. So my hosting provider Linode is migrating my server to new hardware. This will hopefully take less than an hour, and then the server will be back up and more stable. I'll update this post when the migration is complete. In the meantime, be aware that any games you play will not be tracked, so they won't count towards your ranking points.

I'm upgrading the Procyon Games web server to the latest Debian release 5.0 ("lenny"). We'll keep our fingers crossed and hope that after a short reboot everything will be ok. I'll update this post after the upgrade is complete.

UPDATE: Everything is back up and running, and seems to be going smoothly. I'll keep a close eye on it for the next few hours. If anyone notices something that seems off, please tell me!

I'm currently in the middle of a server upgrade, so you may see some glitches. I've had some reports of scoreboards going blank; if this happened to you you can force it to reload by clicking on it. The Follow Me HUDs are not working right now, I'm working on getting those back. If you have any other problems (anything saying "Server error, report to Rifkin") please let me know about it.

En Garde is getting great play, I can see people playing it all day long.

And it's killing my web server.

Every time a game is play, it recalculates the rankings. I can see in my server logs it's taking upwards of ten seconds to do that calculation. That's ten seconds where all my vendors are frozen. And you'll notice it takes at least ten seconds for your new score to be reflected on the board.

Partly it's because I'm running the server on a cheap account, and partly it's because the code isn't as optimized as it could be. So I'll work on the latter.

UPDATE: I've got it down to about five and a half seconds now, which I'll have to live with. Optimizing it further will be quite a bit of work.

I've started the long process of replacing all my vendors inworld.

The Procyon web server handles, among other things, my system of network vendors. And it does a pretty good job -- when I need to update a product, I only have to do it in one place. It's especially good for little things like the "Procyon Games Info" card that I only need to update in one place.

Lately though, it's been getting a little creaky. The problem is XML-RPC, which Linden Lab never implemented quite properly and has never fully supported. As Second Life grows, XML-RPC gets slower and slower, and the result is my vendors become slower and slower to respond. I see people clicking things 3 or 4 times because they don't get a free card, and then they get 4 of them dumped on them.

Occasionally, it will just fail completely. That's no good.

So I rewrote the backend, using all HTTP calls, and an email poke. It should be much more responsive, and initial tests are promising. The problem now is, of course, that I have to replace all my inworld vendors, which is something that having a network vendor system is supposed to make never happen.

It's even worse than that, because my games themselves use the vendor system to distribute things like the Procyon Info notecard (that way they always give the latest version). So I'll need to send out updates to all my games.