Elma Online site: Plans, Ideas, Changes

Ramone · Post by **Ramone** » 5 Aug 2011, 09:48

Ok! Server is fucking horrible. Disconnects like 100 times a day (or more) and yday was down all day. I would gladly pay for EOL if we could make it more stable. Also now more ppl would pay because its only way to submit accepted times. Arrange this pls.

Grace · Post by **Grace** » 5 Aug 2011, 14:05

In the last week the server is going down very frequently, almost making EOL unplayable.

how fix?

Lukazz · Post by **Lukazz** » 5 Aug 2011, 21:29

ranking seems to be kinda unstable at the moment. if i remember correctly zweq was 1st with some 15800 points 3 days ago, jon was 2nd and pab was 3rd. now pab is 2nd with 1600 points, which can't be possible when he is banned. could be backup issues because of unstable server too, dunno, just wanted to point it out.
also where are the flagtag/first finish/etc. stats?

jblaze · Post by **jblaze** » 5 Aug 2011, 23:39

Pab is unbanned, he played 3 battles today and got ~1000 points (which is weird)
generally ranking is ridiculous, just look at that

Lukazz · Post by **Lukazz** » 6 Aug 2011, 01:25

ye ranking is still kinda weird. i was alway between rank 22 and 19 for a few months now, and now suddenly in a few weeks i've become 11th. but i didn't play more or won more balles.

gimp · Post by **gimp** » 6 Aug 2011, 03:15

ramone wrote:Ok! Server is fucking horrible. Disconnects like 100 times a day (or more) and yday was down all day. I would gladly pay for EOL if we could make it more stable. Also now more ppl would pay because its only way to submit accepted times. Arrange this pls.

Yeah this sucks.... I know mila and kopaka obviously didn't expect to be given this responsibility but if the server is down all the time there cant be anymore wrs or external wrs (currently affecting me) and elma will be a bit fucked. eventually some hoyla is gonna get a wr while the server is down and commit suicide. anything to be done about this?

Kopaka · Post by **Kopaka** » 6 Aug 2011, 09:59

Yesterday evening/night mysql server was down and day before the server where eolserver is hosted was down. (db and game is on two seperaete ones), so it was reasons we can't really do anything about, and no matter where we host it there will always be a chance of downtimes, so there's a chance of making a wr offline.

ramone wrote:Ok! Server is fucking horrible. Disconnects like 100 times a day (or more) and yday was down all day. I would gladly pay for EOL if we could make it more stable. Also now more ppl would pay because its only way to submit accepted times. Arrange this pls.

Could you tell me what is the error message you get when disconnecting, when exactly it happens (like during run, always right after a finish ect. or totally random), and if it's a new thing that you get disconnect often or something that has always happened. Can't promise if that will make it possible to find the reason, but atleast i will give me a bigger chance, especially if I'm gonna contact the host about it.

Haruhi wrote:In the last week the server is going down very frequently, almost making EOL unplayable.
how fix?

What do you mean by frequently, many times a day like ramone says? in that case it's not server going down but connection being lost somehow, in that case you could tell me same things I asked ramone to tell, so we know if it's same problems ect.

Lukazz wrote:ranking seems to be kinda unstable at the moment. if i remember correctly zweq was 1st with some 15800 points 3 days ago, jon was 2nd and pab was 3rd. now pab is 2nd with 1600 points, which can't be possible when he is banned. could be backup issues because of unstable server too, dunno, just wanted to point it out.
also where are the flagtag/first finish/etc. stats?

The fact that he was banned might mean he is now some battles behind of the 100 per half year that counts, and that he can then quicly gain some points while he catches up to others. FF, FT ect. are coming back eventually, was in middle of changing some things but then exams and summer ect. came in the way.
When they do I will also be making some stats that makes it more transparent to see how the ranking works.

Grace · Post by **Grace** » 6 Aug 2011, 15:03

several different scenario's

Yesterday (obviously) it wouldn't connect at all - however this continued long after eol site showed eol to be back online. (at least for me)

Today i had some 8-10 hours where it would connect and disconnect literally 0.1seconds later.

Several times in the past week when i hit F11 to download rec, EOL crashes. I know at least morgan said this happened to him also.

Periodic (every 30 minutes maybe) bouts of intense lag where all other players disappear, time continues to countdown and then all messages sent during that time disappear. Followed everytime by several people saying "OMG LAG" and so on.

maybe 50 times in the last week when i connect it will say "now connected to server" and no info will come up in menu's, no chats will send or receive and no period of time fixes it.

Same problem as above except i get the very first word of one menu (ie. if i hit F5, it will bring up "Abula" but not the level he's playing, nor any following players)

Random (and unpredictable) occurances of just normal disconnections, however FAR more frequent than usual.

An increase in the pre-existing problem of times not being sent to database correctly for a battle, resulting in a battle position/time not being updated. (can be quite frustrating)

They're the ones i've experienced. All Disconnections accompanied with a simple "error: you have been disconnected from the server (Press F12 to reconnect)" message.

Kopaka · Post by **Kopaka** » 10 Aug 2011, 12:04

Haven't been playing elma all summer so didn't have any first hand experince on the lag, but I have been last days and can see it can be quite bad. I have a pretty good idea of what can be the problem. I was checking the slow queries log and can see there is quite a few very slow queries run on the site which might take up all the resources or simply lock the table for a long period of time making it impossible for eol to use them. So there is a hope that it will be better. The reason it has gotten worse it probably simply because tables gets bigger as time goes by.

In any case I've started looking at some of those slow queries, but there's a lot, it takes some time to look through the log as there's very many and many almost identical ones, it can take time to find the php file that has the given query and finally can take a lot of thinking to find a better way to make the query so it's faster. So all in all it will probably take some time before things get a lot better, but I'm pretty confident this is the reason, and in worst case scenario the site gets faster.

milagros · Post by **milagros** » 10 Aug 2011, 13:10

in the other words the reason zweq didn't get his apple harvest time in his last pro 1htt was that I was checking how he was doing on teh site all the time:)

ville_j · Post by **ville_j** » 10 Aug 2011, 13:39

And the fact that the database has every single level ever entered online, wasting capacity... Well I don't know how you could solve this problem now that sl is spread and all external times should be verified through eol.

Lousku · Post by **Lousku** » 10 Aug 2011, 16:37

Ville_J wrote:And the fact that the database has every single level ever entered online, wasting capacity... Well I don't know how you could solve this problem now that sl is spread and all external times should be verified through eol.

Have only battled levels and selected levelpacks in the database. Think of designers who test their levels outside internal editor (designers who use external editors). Every version they test is in the database, even if locked. Seems like a big waste of capacity. Would be more convenient for everyone and encourage people to use the levelpack feature on the site.

Kopaka · Post by **Kopaka** » 10 Aug 2011, 17:00

Yes seeing someone playing a level that you want to play with him and having to ask him to upload it on irc or send in msn is much more convenient..

yeah I agree jappe, I might be, atleast temporarily, disabling some features if necessary. Already did with one small thing.

Zweq · Post by **Zweq** » 10 Aug 2011, 17:04

are you sure it's only queries being slow? have you tried the same queries in for example phpmyadmin and seen how fast the result is returned? are you sure it's not php processing. 1htt page took 2½ mins to generate, any idea how insane that is? 2 and a fucking half minutes, seriously? there has been like ten 1htt battles so far! how are the tables formed like? the only stats that are shown on the 1htt page are everyones best tt result. if there is no directly tt saved in db i can imagine all the processing required, even after all that 2½mins doesnt sound right

milagros · Post by **milagros** » 10 Aug 2011, 17:33

1htt times are not saved separately in an own table - they are all saved in the main table (unlike final battle times or best times for levs of all players) of all times and it is gathered from there (it has some index of "battle" there so it knows which times to count)
could be processed somehow, but 2,5 mins is still a lot

ville_j · Post by **ville_j** » 10 Aug 2011, 18:15

Kopaka wrote:Yes seeing someone playing a level that you want to play with him and having to ask him to upload it on irc or send in msn is much more convenient..

No, it is not convenient (no one said that), but if it makes the site faster, I'd say go for it. Whatever it takes to make that site's loading time reasonable.

I don't get why the system was designed like that in the first place. This is a very small community with not that much donations, how are we going to keep having "quality" service when the size of the data goes to infinity in the long run? I mean you must improve the service all the time and costs get bigger and bigger. I am willing to make donations, but I don't see where this is going because of infinitely growing database and growing need of donations. How slow are things after 5 years?

milagros · Post by **milagros** » 10 Aug 2011, 18:18

the problem is not with saving too much data
the problem is with processing (= creating tables on site) of too much data

ville_j · Post by **ville_j** » 10 Aug 2011, 18:35

I don't see how that can be the main problem but ok I haven't seen the code.

Kopaka · Post by **Kopaka** » 10 Aug 2011, 19:18

Zweq wrote:are you sure it's only queries being slow? have you tried the same queries in for example phpmyadmin and seen how fast the result is returned? are you sure it's not php processing. 1htt page took 2½ mins to generate, any idea how insane that is? 2 and a fucking half minutes, seriously? there has been like ten 1htt battles so far! how are the tables formed like? the only stats that are shown on the 1htt page are everyones best tt result. if there is no directly tt saved in db i can imagine all the processing required, even after all that 2½mins doesnt sound right

Alteast for 1htt page the amount of php processing/calculating is quite minimal, and that goes for many of the pages from what I remember, also can see in the slow queries log that there is some queries which takes really a long time to do, so queries is a really big part of it atleast. And yeah I do check in phpmyadmin aswell when trying to improve them. Probably the problem with 1htt page is that best times driven in a 1htt and such needs to be read from the infamous 'time' table which has every run ever driven (21mio rows at this point). So some cronjob that copies from that to a 1htttime table probably is the best solution.

Ville_J wrote:
Kopaka wrote:Yes seeing someone playing a level that you want to play with him and having to ask him to upload it on irc or send in msn is much more convenient..
No, it is not convenient (no one said that), but if it makes the site faster, I'd say go for it. Whatever it takes to make that site's loading time reasonable.

I don't get why the system was designed like that in the first place. This is a very small community with not that much donations, how are we going to keep having "quality" service when the size of the data goes to infinity in the long run? I mean you must improve the service all the time and costs get bigger and bigger. I am willing to make donations, but I don't see where this is going because of infinitely growing database and growing need of donations. How slow are things after 5 years?

Pretty sure having the leveldata there or not won't make a difference, it won't cause less rows in the table ect. And amount of data in GBs doesn't matter (unlimited data at this host), so there won't be a need of bigger donations. But ofcourse in five years there will be around six times as many rows in the tables and potentially slower reading of them.

ville_j · Post by **ville_j** » 10 Aug 2011, 19:51

Yeah well not necessarily, but more levs = more rows, more recs/times = more rows. Anyways no point for me to debate this more now, but I think there definitely is too much of something for the current capacity of the server. Hopefully it will improve in the future

pawq · Post by **pawq** » 10 Aug 2011, 20:28

finish-the-eol-pack-first competition

sounds max! :)!

skint0r · Post by **skint0r** » 11 Aug 2011, 00:12

Pretty much all slowness can be traced back to unoptimized mysql queries, bad indexes etc. The database size has minimal impact on how slow it is, it's only that slow queries will grow exponentially (whatever math jerks) the more data that is processed by those inefficient queries.

It'd be worth looking at using stuff like http://php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php too. Forget database size, it's all about optimal storage and retrieval of the data that's important, not how much of it exist. You'd only have to deal with data size slowing things down if there is a lot of modification of existing rows/tables, which I assume EOL doesn't do since all previously driven times are static data/rows just being retrieved.

/ end of retard not-guru-at-all opinion

Edit: also teh http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/query-cache.html

Ves · Post by **Ves** » 13 Aug 2011, 06:37

I'd recommend to start learning from mysql slow.log and EXPLAIN SELECT

APC is not redundant but I really don't think php performance is a bottleneck.

Why are you not doing proper redirect this time again? http://beta.elmaonline.net/?s=stats&p=levelpack&lp=Pipo should send to http://elmaonline.net/?s=stats&p=levelpack&lp=Pipo , not to the root.

Kopaka · Post by **Kopaka** » 13 Aug 2011, 10:25

That's what I'm doing Ves.

At first didn't bother with such redirect, but realised it's max simple so it's working like that now.

Ves · Post by **Ves** » 13 Aug 2011, 12:37

Kopaka wrote:but realised it's max simple

That's why I asked the question

Only unnecessary slash deletion left to make redirect decent:

http://elmaonline.net//?s=stats&p=levelpack&lp=Pipo

.

roope · Post by **roope** » 13 Aug 2011, 17:25

Mm, the disconnecting is getting to ridiculous proportions. Like several times every balle, and you don't even know when you're disconnected. Sometimes I make a good time and say something, then the line doesn't show up in chat and i'm like fuu

8-ball · Post by **8-ball** » 13 Aug 2011, 19:01

How about making it possible to write comments to individual level pages? And level packs? And rate the levels?

Lousku · Post by **Lousku** » 20 Aug 2011, 18:46

Minor bango but news in email are very bongo:

Code: Select all

didn\'t have time to write a proper news post, I\'ll make up for that now.\r\n\r\n<A HREF="http://elmaonline.net/?s=stats&p=levelpack&lp=EOL"TARGET="_blank">http://elmaonline.net/?s=stats&p=levelpack&lp=EOL</A>

Kestas · Post by **Kestas** » 27 Aug 2011, 22:39

jblaze wrote:

can someone explain me how those Rankings in eol site are working?
what are the maths/algorythms for these?
it all looks so confusing and unlogical for me, have no idea what its counting and how...
the pic from jbl is a good example and a good question mark

my points are growing so slowly, no matter if i win or take 2-3 places it adds up like 0.1(4) points... thats like .. wth, hello?

I had 11670.0 Points like a week ago or some with like 40 win. Now that i have 50 i just earned 11701.4 Points. And stats are bringing me down... am 61st now...

Domi is 62nd with 11699.7 Points and 8 wins. coome oon!
how do i keep my points pumpin? its not moving at all

Grace · Post by **Grace** » 28 Aug 2011, 05:01

Kestas wrote:
jblaze wrote:
can someone explain me how those Rankings in eol site are working?
what are the maths/algorythms for these?
it all looks so confusing and unlogical for me, have no idea what its counting and how...
the pic from jbl is a good example and a good question mark

my points are growing so slowly, no matter if i win or take 2-3 places it adds up like 0.1(4) points... thats like .. wth, hello?

I had 11670.0 Points like a week ago or some with like 40 win. Now that i have 50 i just earned 11701.4 Points. And stats are bringing me down... am 61st now...

Domi is 62nd with 11699.7 Points and 8 wins. coome oon!
how do i keep my points pumpin? its not moving at all

I think it's done on total number of battles, not number of battles won i guess. I have 40 wins like you had and i have 8000 points, And literally the only difference between our playing is that you've played 2200 battles and i've played less than 600 :/

Kopaka · Post by **Kopaka** » 28 Aug 2011, 10:48

The one on the right probably has won many battles with few players, so they don't give a lot of points and vice verca for the guy on the left. The reason you might not get a lot of points after a battle, or none at all (and remember it takes up to 10 mins before it updates) is that only your 100 best per half year counts, so that you can't just play a lot of battles and be first. So if you make some good result you will lose your points for your 100th best result and be replaced with the points you got this battle.

For a more short term ranking you can check the relative one, which can change a lot after just one battle.

Grace · Post by **Grace** » 28 Aug 2011, 11:22

Kopaka wrote:The one on the right probably has won many battles with few players, so they don't give a lot of points and vice verca for the guy on the left. The reason you might not get a lot of points after a battle, or none at all (and remember it takes up to 10 mins before it updates) is that only your 100 best per half year counts, so that you can't just play a lot of battles and be first. So if you make some good result you will lose your points for your 100th best result and be replaced with the points you got this battle.

For a more short term ranking you can check the relative one, which can change a lot after just one battle.

So you have to get good results in battles with many players for a high ranking, rather than many wins?

Kestas · Post by **Kestas** » 28 Aug 2011, 12:07

only 100 best battles counts out of the bloody 2200 i have played into my 11701.4 Points ??? pffft haha
who thought of such a nonesonce,,,,
so this means even if i win a battle of lets say 7 ppl, i might end up gettin a round 0 to add up to my points ;D

thanks anyways for explaining that, is lame but is what it is.

Mats · Post by **Mats** » 29 Aug 2011, 21:47

I just watched the multi best times on internals and it seems kinda bugged. Got me thinkin, is there some bug that makes it possible to cheat times on single player eol times?

milagros · Post by **milagros** » 29 Aug 2011, 22:03

bug is with flagtag recs driven on one comp
its easily fixable (half line), dunno why did that happen:/

Mats · Post by **Mats** » 29 Aug 2011, 22:54

Thx, Good to know

Kopaka · Post by **Kopaka** » 12 Sep 2011, 18:00

I updated the to do in first post. One the of things on it is recoding entire site with a framework which I've already started on. The old code is written in standard non object oriented way which makes some things tedious to update and maintain and there's also some badly coded stuff and slow queries which makes the site slow and maybe even hurts performance ingame. So that's the reason, but also it's something new for me so I'm more motivated to work on that.

But anyway the reason I post this is that if you have some good ideas for improvements you can let me know now so when I get to that part of the code I can do it while I'm working on it anyway, and it might also be easier to implement some new stuff when doing it from scratch. But ofcourse I will be skipping some stuff, even things that are already on the old site in order to be able to publish it as fast as possible.

Igge · Post by **Igge** » 12 Sep 2011, 18:24

I want a new (improved) ladder with cool arrows so you can see who's climbing up and who's falling behind.

Seriously though. A nice ladder that actually works would be coal (and it doesn't require new eol coding).

Orcc · Post by **Orcc** » 12 Sep 2011, 19:57

That "Ban Pawq" should be put to high priority.

Also it would be nice to see designer stats again, TL must have taken teh lead nicely.

Mats · Post by **Mats** » 12 Sep 2011, 22:11

Donated a 100$, so you got some to work with

schnon · Post by **schnon** » 14 Sep 2011, 13:39

mb you should add a "resend email confirmation" button.
i didnt recieve the email to activate my account and now i cant play.

after that i tried to change my password and the email for the changed password did arrive.

while you do that plz activate my account "schnon" on elmaonline site or resend the email. thx

gimp · Post by **gimp** » 5 Oct 2011, 08:47

I was thinking that while a battle is in play one could have the choice to simply spectate the other players, at the same time having there times disabled from being put in the battle times and also their chat disabled for the duration of the time the battle is happening. I know the main reason I ever make battles is because I feel like spectating the different styles. Also I think you should be able to turn this spectating mode on even if you are in the middle of a battle and feel like you don't want to participate anymore but would rather watch. Possible?

Zweq · Post by **Zweq** » 5 Oct 2011, 15:16

gimp wrote:Possible?

There would be other channels for communication, which you probably thought of but didn't mention. Also I think mila meant belma/eol to be close to what #battle used to be, styles are equally strong, if not stronger than skills. This is where the no old levs rule comes from also.

Only saying what's what, might even be stating the obvious for everyone. Anyways, what I don't know is if this kind of progress should be allowed to happen. People easily get used to old methods and formats and it's like people's brain is switched on "decline". Perhaps this idea would work, at least I can't imagine anyone "sacrificing" his battle result just to spy styles and reporting them to another player. The real problem, at least theoretically is phantom users. Anyway my conclusion is no thanks

Lousku · Post by **Lousku** » 5 Oct 2011, 18:28

Human nature ruins another delightful idea.

gimp · Post by **gimp** » 5 Oct 2011, 20:44

Zweq wrote:
gimp wrote:Possible?
There would be other channels for communication, which you probably thought of but didn't mention.

The real problem, at least theoretically is phantom users.

I agree these are both potential problems.

The first though like you said is much less probable, I couldn't imagine somebody giving up a balle just so they could then go on msn and then report to another player "hey go right and do hang instead ez faster", I guess if you're teaming up with someone like this then congrats you and someone else are cheating for only a possible and not very fulfilling balle win. People cheating for internal wr's, contests, TT, or whatever makes more sense as it's a more grandiose accomplishment for them. Keep in mind the one helping has no real incentive because they get nothing out of it unless they strike a deal and say, "I'll spy some balles if you do and we will trade off giving each other advice". Also the people who might participate in this form of cheating probably blow ass at elma and we dont have to worry about them winning regardless if they know Zweq's impsy style. I find your first point "There would be other channels for communication" rather unlikely and not much of a threat, but I'm sure you already know that and did kind of mention it.

Phantom users - Yeah...... Good point. The only thing I can say is that the number of people possible in doing this decreases a lot as to whom knows how to/has the motivation. The number further decreases as to whom is capable with their skills to exploit a style they didn't previously know and be able to win with it. The points begin to not matter as much when many balles have obvious styles. Lastly, I think only a few people in the community anyways have such an immoral soul as to create phantom users and cheat in balles like this a lot. All things considered, this is not much of a threat either compared to the overall enjoyment we would get out of spying while eating lunch or something.

Madness · Post by **Madness** » 6 Oct 2011, 00:38

I don't think anybody would ever bother by creating some stupid phantom users just to copy others' styles and then try to win a stupid battle this way. It couldn't even be entertaining for anybody to cheat like this, since all the fun of playing battles consists just in finding styles. But on the other side, if there was a possibility like this, most people wouldn't be able to shut the fuck up about the styles they spied. I don't like this idea.

gimp · Post by **gimp** » 6 Oct 2011, 04:52

Madness wrote:But on the other side, if there was a possibility like this, most people wouldn't be able to shut the fuck up about the styles they spied. I don't like this idea.

Madness that's why in my idea i suggested that your chat be turned off while the balle is going should you choose to spectate. Then they don't have a choice BUT to shut up.

Madness · Post by **Madness** » 6 Oct 2011, 14:46

Oh, I didn't read your post properly =) If it was implemented like this, it could be a pretty good feature.

Orcc · Post by **Orcc** » 6 Oct 2011, 22:16

Replay online hasn't worked at all for over a week (used to work at least sometimes), anyone else having teh problem?

Kopaka · Post by **Kopaka** » 7 Oct 2011, 20:27

Yeah it's been same for me Orcc lately.

And you other guys are in the wrong topic btw., this is for talk about the site. :)

On a different note, about the lag issues that was discussed earlier. It has been a bit better lately hasn't it, or is it just me?