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This Sunday, expect the site to be down from 8am until as late as noon. Tim will be taking Newgrounds off-line to make some big hardware changes. This could take as little as an hour, but it may take up to four hours before the site is back on-line.

ATTENTION SAN FRANCISCO

If you live in the San Franciso Area, please come out to the Independent Games Festival Pavilion at Moscone Center during the Game Developers Conference. The Festival is open to the public and is FREE. We will be there with Alien Hominid and Edmund will be there with Gish! Dates are March 9th - 11th from 11:30am to 6:30pm. I won't be available on Friday the 11th, however...

ATTENTION AUSTIN, TEXAS

I am flying direct from San Fran to Austin, Texas, where I am speaking at the South by Southwest festival. Although registration is required for most of the conference, my speech is FREE, so come on down if you are in the area! I will be speaking at 7:30PM on Friday, March 11th.

EXACT INFO:

"The SXSW Interactive Festival is hosting a FREE presentation from Alien Hominid developer Tom Fulp at 7:30 pm on Friday, March 11. This presentation occurs on the top floor of the annex of the Austin Convention Center. Enter at the 4th and Trinity corner of the building."

The SXSW Schedule is available on-line, as is more Information about the Game Developers Conference and the Independent Game Festival.

Remember, both events are FREE, so come say hi! I would especially like to see people in Austin who can come ask questions! I'll feel more comfortable if there are NG fans in the room.

Tim is finally installing the load balancer, which is a big box that manages all the servers. When a server crashes, it takes it off-line so no one hits a dead server (something which currently needs to be done manually). It also evenly distributes the traffic among the servers so they all run at the same capacity (currently, a single server can randomly get overloaded with more traffic than the others). So in general, it should make the site performance more robust and dependable.

At 3/4/05 12:40 PM, VeryProudofYa wrote: Well that sounds very usefull, but how often does a server crash?

Our servers used to crash a lot, although we have really dependable servers running at the moment. However, we have had recent crashes due to recent traffic spikes. That was mostly due to our bandwidth limitations - when we reach our max bandwidth, we "drop packets". When this happens, the end user's computer makes additional requests to our server, trying to complete the download. What eventually happens is the servers become backlogged trying to deliver all the data and they crash. We are resolving this by raising our bandwidth, which we hope to have complete by the end of next week.

At 3/4/05 12:55 PM, LazyFuckingBastard wrote: That makes sense.... so, theoretically, we should recieve no errors unless all 500 megabits of bandwidth are being used, right?

Don't confuse database errors with the webservers going down. As it stands now (my description of this may not be entirely accurate, because I'm no good with networking), the webservers are on a round-robin setup. There are a list of servers in the configuration and when a user hits the site, they're randomly directed to one of the webservers in the cluster.

If one of those webservers goes down, people still get directed to it, until Tim manually takes the webserver out of the configuration file(s) (and even then, it takes a short while for people's dns to actually update).

With the load balancer, IT decides what webserver will be used - requests get sent to whichever webserver is most lightly loaded at the time. If a webserver goes offline, the load balancer knows not to send requests off to that webserver. So it should mean that you always get directed to the pages you're looking for, even if the pages do eventually serve up a database-related error message.

The load balancer probably does some other fancy stuff that I'm missing, too, but what I've described so far is one of the main benefits of having it. Maybe Tim will come in and post some additional details.

Make sense? :)