Server World
I spent last night wandering the streets of downtown Chicago with a 30 pound 1U Server. I ended up walking almost 3 city blocks with this thing before I collapsed in the lobby of the Chicago Board of Trade, my final destination.
Long story short, I dragged the server to the elevator, went up to the 11th floor and had the machine installed at the datacenter. This machine will be our new FFR home and should make a fine home for atleast the next 3 years (that is when my lease is up on it!). As of now I have copied all 20GB+ of FFR over to the new server but I will be referencing the old database for the next 12 hours. At some point after that, I will move the database local and it will be screaming fast once again.
This has been a crazy month if you only count all the financing paperwork I had to go through. Throw FFR server moves and upgrades and you raise that difficulty by 5x. Throw in working on 3rd style and you raise it another 5x. 
P.S. If you want to know if you are on the old or new server, just drop into a dos prompt and type ping www.flashflashrevolution.com if it starts with a 209, you are on the old. If it starts with 67 you are on the new.
Cheers,
Synthlight
R2 Songs Fixed
I was told this afternoon that the R2 version of FFR was not loading songs. I wanted to apologize for the problem and let everyone know that R2 is now working correctly again. Let me know if you experience any problems with the game.
Cheers,
Synthlight
New Multiplayer Server
If you cannot connect to multiplayer but where able to yesterday or earlier today, please clear your cache. I switched everyone over to the new multiplayer server today at around 2:30pm Central Time.
Cheers,
Synthlight
Multiplayer Changes
I will be working on Multiplayer bugs tonight and have hopefully squashed the “clearing” bug that is annoying everyone. I will have to do some testing tonight to make sure that fix (and others) works without any problems.
Hopefully we will make some progress against the spammers and attention whores in there.
Cheers,
Synthlight
Small Changes
Because of the load spikes that nearly brought FFR to a standstill every hour, we were forced to switch over onto completely new servers. The new server has more ram and 3x the CPU power.
In the next 2 weeks we will be saying goodbye to Texas and moving the server again to a colocation facility located within the Chicago Board of Trade building in Chicago. We will be leasing a Dual Opteron server with dual cores on each CPU. The server will have approximately 12GB of ram. Because we are leasing vs renting, our operating cost will go down and our server ability will go up about 5x (hint, new projects). I will also be within a 40 minute drive of the datacenter just in case anything happens.
I had a few minutes to add some of the older header information back in at the top of the main page, forum and adjusted some forum colors. There may be a few oddities in the forum (small fonts) until I get time later on to finish what I started.
It’s starting to feel normal around here again.
Cheers,
Synthlight
Testing Testing Testing
# of online users and a few other things might not look right tonight until the new IP has propagated. You should notice a speed increase even though we have not installed php accelerators or optimized anything on the new server yet.
Cheers,
Synthlight
Load Spikes
For the last 2 weeks we have been experiencing massive load spikes on the 5th minute of every hour.. This has caused apache restarting and problems connecting at certain peak times. I just wanted to let everyone know that I finally solved the problem. No, I am not sharing the solution nor the cause.
Cheers,
Synthlight
SERVER CLOCK!!!
Now that I have your attention, I would like everyone to note that server time has been adjusted to be correct. Please adjust your timezones accordingly in your user settings.
Cheers,
Synthlight
Experiment X part 3
Tonight we will be working on a number of improvements and cleanups since the upgrades and will continue to optimize code.
*We have removed the javascript page loading progress bar from all portions of FFR*
Cheers,
Synthlight
