by mantux5 » Sat Aug 22, 2015 2:19 pm
Alright, I'm going to write a few suggestions here, because I feel that some of the things you are doing are wrong.
First of all, you should calculate UpTime using the Start and Current times. This would make it show the correct value all the time. Next, there should be some sort of process to check for other processes status. And if one or more processes are failing, they should be killed and new ones made. This would fix the issue of the "Session terminator" getting stuck. Well, it would fix most of the issues my team is having right now. I'm almost 100% sure that the "Session terminator" process is getting stuck because of some not considered and unexpected data from the user or the server itself. That's why some debugging tools should be implemented, to make the problem come out easier. Thinking of workaround, such as limiting connections and such won't fix the problem. The cause of problem should be found and eliminated. This is how I do things.
Also, regarding the System timer, which is working with Uptime and Tournaments, I have experienced the problem of the tournaments not starting at the time specified a long time before. Even when system gets back up and start counting again, it does not start the tournament even if time has passed. I think we should be allowed to at least have an option to allow it to be started at this situation. Well, I won't need it now, because I have made a CRON task to start the tournaments a minute after they should be started, so if the server itself did not start them, they are started via API call. This works quite well.
Another thing that interests me, how do the PerfMon logs help you to determine the problem? Yes, you can see an increases usage of resources. But you can't see any reason why it is like that. As I mentioned before, you should add some debugging tools for the software. Restarting server is not an option. Because it crashes at least once a week. If there is no one to restart it, we are simply losing money with that. Even if there is someone to restart the server, we are still losing money and clients. People consider website unreliable because it crashes constantly. Also, it takes at least 40 minutes to restart the server (This may not apply to everyone, because everyone have different amount of users). We have over 76 000 registered users, so it takes a ton of time to load all the data files. Also, all the logs older than a month are being saved, so we could safely retrieve them via API, without any need to create any external system to store them. You should consider implementing a different data handling system, because it takes tons of time to load and I can't find any advantages of it (Well, I might be wrong, because I'm not sure about the exact technology you are using). Either way the issue stays - long loading time. We are growing quite fast, so it will soon take 1 hour or even more just to load all the data. During that hour we could earn a hundred or two.
Thank you for your time and efforts releasing the previous updates, but I expect what I wrote here will be considered and at least some of it will be implemented, even though not that many new purchases of the software are made (I might be wrong about that too. This is just my assumption due to low activity on the forums) so this might make you less motivated to do big changes to the software.
Anyway, thank you for the help you gave us before.