So our usage spiked. Across all the sites, we're using 1.7% of the possible CPU power of an entire server over an entire day. The other sites on rovl are never a problem - it's always RWL, I find.
A few things, then:
Until this gets resolved, turns will come once a day if at all.
I am resetting regular in the first days of the new year, be prepared
I am resetting turbo at the same time - it's useless to reset it now, because there may be no turns.
I'm angry because this is the third time the hosting company has threatened to suspend my account because of RWL in the past few months. (admittedly, this might not be because of RWL. The last two times were, and they sent me an e-mail this time saying that the contact forms here were potentially unsafe, so...it probably is RWL this time, too)
I'm angry because all the service for the hosting company shut down early today, and won't be back until Monday. Therefore, I don't get any feedback on my attempts to fix the problem until Monday.
Have a happy holidays, you've all just made mine a bit worse.
Well isn't this just fuggin wonderful. Is there anything us RWLers can do to help?
= (
is 1.7% really all that much? unless its a really powerful machine... *shrug*
and we're not near as big now as before...
ah well, happy holidays Retto
and thanks again for hostin and putting up with us..
It is when are only supposed to take up 1%. And the turns thingy isn't working Retto. We aren't getting any turns at all now. Unless it starts tomorrow?
I think you are not getting how important this is. 1.7% of a server could be a lot if they rent space to ? lets say 100,000 people. We have no way to know if this fixed the problem. If not, then all of ROVL will come tumbling down in a few days. We have reason to think Turbo may be the problem, but can?t be sure. We debated a lot of options, including taking both games down and wiping them out, then reset in a few weeks after a complete overhaul. Be happy we took the least major option, and still risking that if the problem is in regular or one of Retto?s other games, then still we will go down without further notice.
Listen well my little critters, type softly and hope we will be seeing each other in the new year. If anyone comes to check the site and we are down, we will hope to get back up in less then 10 days.
Wolf Bite
Who's the current provider? Maybe it's time to switch?
Take forum database dumps, just in case. The same goes for current BAXX codebase. Do not allow the host to take our data down with them.
I must also wonder if there has been something unusual in the recent server logs that could explain this. Is someone launching some sort of denial of service attack aginst RWL?
I realize how serious it is wolf. I was just curious about turns, I thank Retto profusely for keeping us up and running. And listen to nevada! He's right, we can't afford to lose the forums data or the codebase.
I talking to Retto about that very question, but he says he can't access anything that would tell him that. He suspects a hacker messing with scripts, or spammers, but no one has done anything obvious. Whatever they are doing, they are being very subtle about it.
And Shogun, I thought of that very idea, I tried to talk to Joe (Creator of Hack, maintains the staronesw server FaF runs on), but he never answered. Do you know if there is space on his server nev? (...And if he would let us on it of course)
Did I break RWL?
There are plenty of great, cheap webhosts out there. No doubt Retto could find one that has everything he needs at a reasonable price.
No, you didn't cloud, not unless you messed with the scripts.
We were haveing problems with space a while ago... Apperently the catchall mailbox was filled with 50mb of spam. Not sure about now... And as far as if they would let RWL in, I can't say.
RWL is hosted by a company by the name of "Lunarpages", a division of Add2Net, Inc. It is based out of La Habra, Calafornia. 100 East La Habra Blvd., La Habra, CA, 90631 to be exact.
There may be a lot of hosts out there. But think of it like a hotell, you pay for one room but bring 50 people that use the full floor, they kick you out and don't give your money back. So even if we changed hosts, the problem MUST be fixed or the new one will kick us out. But then if it is fixed, why go to a new place?
Wolf Bite
I'll mail retto a 20$ for his trouble.
The complaint of excessive resource usage is a rather vapid charge at best. Mainly because it is hard to measure consumption of system resources. So, no real way for a custamer to either prove or disprove what the host says. So, it is basicly a classic way for a webhost to rip off its custamers. And there is still the possibility of a (D)DoS attack...
<plug>Perhaps a change of codebase is in order? FAF is easy enough to adapt, and perhaps may consume fewer reasources</plug>
Hm, suprised about Lunarpages acting like that. I use LunarPages as well, find them to be a great host and have wonderful customer support.
LOL. Nevada, I highly doubt Retto is going to adopt the FaF codebase, for one thing, its a prom codebase so just as vulnerable to attack, and two, why would it consume less? It does more than RWL does.
FAF has fixed a number of the security bugs in Prominance. As far as preformance, it could go either way.... Perhaps I should do some proper load testing someday.
The report from the 24th said that we went from using 1.7% of the daily average CPU to 0.31%.
That looks like a huge change, and while they haven't said anything definitively, I think we should be alright. I am thinking that there might be some issues in the turns.php code in dealing with dead warlords (perhaps, I haven't had time to look at it too much. I think there are some things we can improve upon, though), and so resetting the servers might help. When I get back home, we'll reset reg, and bring back normal (perhaps a bit faster? Input?) speed turns. I'll get the CPU down from that, and then we'll do Turbo.
Wow... that is a HUGE change. If I had to guess, I'd say there is a problem somewhere in the turns code. As to faster turns in reg, well, a bit higher turn limit and maybe 2/every 10min? I dunno, but a 3-4 day wait on reg to refil is a bit ridiculous. We should try and speed up the pace just a bit. Like 0 turns and 0 stored refilled in both in 2 days? Or a period of time with a faster turn cycle, or day. Like Joe had in Hack, or you have in Turbo? I dunno. I'll see what's in suggestions.
2/10 wouldn't be a bit higher... that would be twice as high... doubling the speed? are you nutso?
heh, i love reg the speed it is... makes it a very stable, political, and strategic game. A faster pace would take away some of the stratagising and politics.... it would make soloing easier too
I'd vouch for an increase in speed. It's way too slow the way it is and causes a quick loss of interest for anyone not as boring as peace.
Hey, it was just a suggestion Peace. I don't see you making any.
Keep the speed. It's how I like my regular. Notice I never play turbo. I love the politics and strategy involved in regular.
I, too, like reg the way it is...
Normally politiking is all that sustains me as I havent any real playing talent yet =-P
I have the second or third oldest account still alive on reg and if you look at mine versus PAs attacks/defenses you'll see what i mean. ;-)
---
Why dont we speed turbo down a bit instead?
Making 2 runs in the span of 24 hours gets kinda hard, and id also like to see 2 month reset periods on it. It doesnt take a lot of talent to build an army of rats in 5 or so runs and just pummel everyone for a month if ya know what im saying.
I'm supporting that idea. Maybe more people would play turbo if it wasn't so fast paced. Besides a change wouldnt be bad.
the point of turbo is to be fast paced. That's why I liked it, if I had a plan set out there was only one day where things could mess it up instead of a week.
I know I would play turbo more if it wasn't as fast... but I'd also like reg more if it was faster. But that's just me.
One of the problem with all the dead warlords was that, with the way we were doing rankings, it assign everyone their new rank (even if it was the same as their old one) every 10 minutes of every hour of every day. With over a thousand accounts, and the processing we do on each query to ensure saftey, you can imagine the load. So I just added a check to make sure that the new rank is different than the old rank when we assign one. We'll see by tomorrow how that affects the usage statistics, and go from there.
In the mean time, Reg turns are moving normally again. You all still want a reset?
I'd prefer one, since my account got deleted for some reason.
Yeah, I'd like a reset, reg is dead, and it would clear out all the old gunk, which would help with the usage. I just don get why the usage spike would happen now, we've had all those dead wralords for awhile.
Mine seems to be gone, as well.
Quote from: cloud on January 03, 2006, 06:44:08 PM
I'd prefer one, since my account got deleted for some reason.
I'm in favour of a reset.
On the suspect of lunarpages: Servers got DOS'd today, at least Krittika did. My site is down now, which sucks. :S
I think everyone would like one now, since there was a lot of inactive accounts
Yes, reset.
How are turns proccesed? Does it go through all the accounts? Dead and alive? Someone check turns.php....
G... germania? where've you been? i thought you were in jail again or something, lol
*digs out copy of BAXX sourcecode*
Ok...
Here is the relivant code in turns.php
print "Updating ranks...";
$users = mysql_query("SELECT num FROM $playerdb ORDER BY disabled ASC, networth DESC;");
$urank = 0;
while ($user = mysql_fetch_array($users))
{
$urank++;
mysql_query("UPDATE $playerdb SET rank=$urank WHERE num=$user[num];");
}
/*$users = mysql_query("SELECT num FROM $playerdb WHERE disabled != 2 AND land = 0 ORDER BY networth DESC;");
while ($user = mysql_fetch_array($users))
{
$urank++;
mysql_query("UPDATE $playerdb SET rank=$urank WHERE num=$user[num];");
}*/
Odd, the old code that was commented noted if there did not update ranks for dead people, at least I think.
So its possible someone was messing with it and Retto didn't realize they were?
Not likely... Everything in turns.php is fired via cron. If you attempt to launch it thourgh the web server, you would fail.
To prove that: http://www.redwallwarlords.com/turns.php
Access forbidden!
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: htmlend() in /home/redwallw/public_html/turns.php on line 18
Which is just what is supposed to happen. However, if you were to call it through PHP indapendently of Apache, it would run... And I do not have the access to do that, else I would have messed up the turns.
However, the real time scores could be exploited like that, at least I belive. Perhaps something could be added to exclude dead empires from real time rankings.
Quote from: Peace Alliance on January 07, 2006, 06:22:59 PM
G... germania? where've you been? i thought you were in jail again or something, lol
Around.
What I meant by processing turns for dead accounts was eventually when you hit a certain point, you had say 900 dead accounts which would still get time devoted to by cron when it processed turns.php. I guess you would have to; to a point so the ranks would update and they could settle at the bottom but maybe a bypass line if:dead then:skip logic after initial rankings are updated.
Well, bravo, to everyone who has been mucking about, and the idiots who put up with their lies and schemes:
QuoteHello,
I have had to disable your cron jobs as the processes weren't dying off, and
the server had load of 44. Usual load is up to around 10.
As this has caused an issue before, I must ask that you do not put them back
again, as they are not suitable for our shared hosting plan.
You need to upgrade to dedicated if you want to host these. Alternatively,
it might be ok if you run them every hour, but definately not as they have been
running, as they have caused problems twice now.
Oh great, thanks guys. No turns again.
maybe if beatles wasn't hacking the code and using programs...
think before you speak
research before you accuse
i challenge you to piss me off
you think the little hack jobs beatles has been running in the background
or adding nicknacks here and there has been a problem to your server?
i promise if you dont retract your accusation, i WILL have something done
before you weren't worth my time but if you piss me off aaron i swear to god.
i warned you five different times through your admin proxies that beatles had a bastardized form of adminship
that he was running 3rd party programs
that he was doing things that shouldn't be allowed
instead of listening you guys shrugged me off
you dug your own hole, not me- i just played the game and that's all i did
keep on blaming the wrong people and bad things will happen
What about Snare's maxing program? Beatles isn't the only on Josh. All the blame does not fall on Beatles. Someone is screwing with the servers, and I think I know who it is, but I will not say it until I have better proof. And I don't mean Josh. He doesn't know how to code, let alone hack.
Quit accusing me, Josh.
Besides, this problem doesn't appear to have anything to do with any player. It's just crons, as Germania said, they're ineffectively written.
Retto, run them manually and see where the holdup is.
Well the first time RWL did this, VI had a problem too. VI seems to appear fine at the moment, no complaints thus far. I don't know much about coding or anything along those lines, but I figured it was just ROVL. Seems that it isn't, and the first set of problems were not connected.
Funny how when both Josh and Beatles returns, strange things start happening. Not blaming either one, but what a funny story. Our celeb banned-keep-coming-back-pain-in-butt member comes back who is always blamed for everything, and one of our oldbies-who-stirred-things-up-and-can-code-and-such members also comes back. And the system goes nuts. No wonder you two are going to get blamed. And blame each other... :?
Heh. Actually, it's not a coincidence.
The first batch of server problems -- before either of us were here -- caused RWL to be reset. That in turn, prompted Josh to come back, to "pwn" as it were, on a level playing field.
FAF's anniversary release on Jan. 10 merely coincided with this. You can look up the original 2005 Jan. 10 release on Sourceforge (project: faf) or at our own forums.
This second batch of problems merely appears to be inertia -- problems that aren't fixed will continue to be a pain.
To Josh and anyone that agrees with his last statement under ?thenextone,?
Lets all be mature about this. When people have in the past violated, or was in on others violating a server, then the odds of them being the one next time are multiplied. You have in the past admitted to be part of violations; such as I believe changed all account names to your own. Fixes have been put in since then. Beatles has also violated the program in the past. I would not be surprised if most of the programmers he hangs out with were told how. Unfortunately we have not been told how they did it and can thus not make that fix. Retto?s statement is correct in that had people not been stabbing at his program for years now we would not be having such problems.
Those people that are likely to hack are watched more closely. Checks are run on those accounts a few times a day, including recording what they presently have and seeing if there are any major discrepancies that I don?t believe their strat could produce. We can?t catch all things right away, but in the long run they are found.
I know that you and other people have reported that different people are cheating. There are about 6 people who have been reported. So what should I do, just delete any account that someone makes a statement about without any proof? Evidence that I can check is checked. ?Ninja made a sudden jump in net worth!? Great! But if their account could have done that, I have no right to disable. Seems to me that even josh complains that the program was tampered with when I did find evidence. I know what it would be like if I just stated deleting people because I feel they could be cheating.
Frankly I think this is all ridicules. This is a game, not the IRS. The safeties in play should be satisfactory if it were not for people that don?t value the belongs of others. If this was a poker game that paid real money, I could maybe understand. If someone had value but changing their grades to get into a better university, then maybe I could understand. But this is a game to see who has the best talent. What glory would there be in taking a motorcycle to a bicycle race? A gun to a sword fight? How about playing college football against a grammar school? In the long run, no one values the winner. I put most of the people around here above cheating because there is no self worth for them even if they know how.
I know that some people may just not like me or Retto or whoever they are fighting, thus damaging the program makes them feel they got some revenge. But this logic also fails. Kind of like blowing up a bus of your own friends to get your one enemy. There are 50 people in each game that are innocent and just want to play a game and have fun. So why would anyone want to destroy the program or even cheat stop them from advancing to their highest talent?
Wolf Bite
wasn't really accusing you of anything
i told retto what was going on and he didn't od anything
and he turns around and blames me
im not sure if it could be a compilation of errors/time or just bad luck with everything..
retto has the most inside information i would suspect
and he's made it pretty clear that it wasn't a running error and i would have to take his stand on things as the problems were backtoback after an entire server reset and i would suspect a complete memory/cache dump
it owuld just imply tampering
that's all
Your post makes no sense.
[edit] OK, we talked on AIM. The situation still makes no sense but it's not your fault.
[edit: reason for post dissapeared]
I blame Volkov :-D
actually, probably not, but w/e, lol.
LOL. Man, I am just not popular today.
alright alright
let me explain
server caused problems, related to the code that gives turns
> retto wipes redwall information for regular and turbo
> retto starts with a clean slate with basically no altered code from when he started, save for some turbo exceptions none of which deal with when turns are given
>same problems happen again
question is, why?
it's like formatting your computer because of a malware infection but it happens again without introducing foreign contageons
>>>>>conclusion being an outside influence has caused these problems
>>>>>UNLESS information above is false, like retto not doing a thorough deletion, etc
edit: if there is an outside influence it is just as likely to be anyone,
-see habit vs character.
*is extremely bored*
Retto you do realize that we are all so addicted to this game that with out it we go insane right?
So, I've put turns back, but as you can tell, it's on a slightly different scale:
In turbo "You get 30 Turns every 60 minutes", at 6 minutes after the hour
In reg, "You get 7 Turns every 60 minutes", at 3 minutes after the hour
If people keep hounding on the server to make us take so much CPU, Turbo will get turns less frequently, and will eventually have to be stopped. This could create different dynamics in the game because it's not very continuous anymore, but we'll see how things go.
We ran for two years with more servers and more players, so logically it shouldn't be a problem.
Excellent, Retto.
This should discourage those that stay on and on just for the extra drop of turns that arrives every 10 minutes.
A disadvantage is that people will appear online for 2 hours. Or an advantage, depending on how you look at it.
Markets will fill up slower -- I should think?
However, it will probably end those little online spats people have when they run out of turns and wait for more.
It has good and bad effects, I suppose.
I simply don't believe that there's an increase of utilization due to nothingness.
Was this increase happening at the same time beatles was running his script?
Not to say there was any intentional malice but sometimes scripts, if used wrong, or sometimes unforseen bugs, can cause server-side lag, or in redwall's case increased utilization.
I remember a few cases back when I used to play on Dark Realm, a private Ultima Online Server. When too many people ran certain macro's with incorrect delays they would lag the server.
I doubt it. People do kill runs fine all the time. My script just fetched the main page news, and slowly at that. Besides, the problem appeared some days after I stopped the script.
Turns have just flat out stopped. On both games as far as I can tell.
Yep.
I got 60 turns and then it must have stoped.
~FWF
Turns seem to be running fine for me. They only come once an hour, but they're running fine...
really? i've only gotten 120 turns in the past 2 days
nothing during power hours
same
Ah, you're talking turbo. I was refering to Reg, sorry. Turbo did seem to be a slow.
Turbo was stopped as far as I could tell. Reg is working though. But both problems seem to have cleared up.
Could we increase the rate at which the mercs refil? It's now only hapening at 1/6th of the rate it used to, due to the slower cron updates, but setting it to refil 6 times more per update would fix that problem.
I shouldn't think that would be too hard, just a matter of adjusting one variable, correct?
retto's already been informed
notl ike you have any funds to purchase anything anyways
I wasn't aware that he had been informed, so I thought I'd mention it.
Josh, do you think I care whether I have funds to purchase anything? I'm not interested in personal gain, I'm trying to help the game function as well as possible. Since I'm not a coder, and not part of the inner circle of people, I do what I can. This is what I can do at the moment.
i don't believe you
Yeah, and why don't you just go slam your dingy in a toilet seat while you're at it!
...dang, tried being arrogant, but I'm not quite on Josh's level.