Thank you cg for your ongoing imrovements to this site! Will the comment notifications come back soon?
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Thanks for doing this for us cg, let us know if we can help somehow!
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A small price to pay temporarily and a big improvement noticed, nice.
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Why don't you use indiegogo/ kickstarter or even patreon for us to help you with the hardware upgrades and other costs?
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Or a donation page? If a bunch of people chipped in a few bucks it would help.
cg, any particular reason yon don't want to do this?
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While I only know about him via his forum posts, CG seems too hands off & giving to want to take from anyone else.
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He gets some money from advertising. I assume this is enough to justify the upgrades.
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128GB Fancy, i did some days ago a puzzle that required cheking my old giveaways but not problems.... xD thanks for the warnning :v
and thank you cg.
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TLDR: stop looking at your entered giveaways all the time! Let it go! You won some, you lost many, tomorrow is another day. Also, the server is getting a RAM upgrade.
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People usually look entered giveaways to leave some GAs to free points when needed.
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Yeah, it's quickest way to do it without leaving any unwanted entries (like when you won something and want to leave all GAs for it - public and private alike).
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Thanks for the update.
(To be honest I am wondering a bit how you're paying for it and what kind of system you got set up server-wise but that's just my curiosity :p)
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I've got a 256mb ddr stick somewhere in here I could part with for few gta 5s. :-)
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Thanks for keeping us informed. They're using hard drives? Why not some RAID configuration with SSDs? SSDs have much better access time than HDDs... That is the most important advantage of SSD over HDD.
Random read latency:
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And they are few times more expensive than HDDs. That's why they won't be used as primary storage space for a long time (having on them tons of photos, games, movies and so on)
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I'm talking about enterprise SSDs, not consumer garbage. Thousands of servers on Internet use SSDs.
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SLC SSD also dies fast with a lot of writes and are very expensive.
Enterprises usually use that "consumer garbage" too, because it's much cheaper to them to change the drives every month than to buy a very expensive one that's going to last just some months more.
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Thats actually not true. They do not die dast because of many writes. There is more than enough resources there. It's a myth. In 99% of early SSD death the faulty controller is the cause.
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Could be budget available to him to upgrade things. You realise he wouldn't have an endless budget to spend updating the site. And since he doesn't want us donating for it, I imagine a fair bit comes out of his own pockets.
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Do you know by any chance why donations are not accepted? This site will continue growing like crazy and there are bunch of nice people that would love to help.
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From what I remember, from the moment you accept donations people have expectations and feel entitled to a certain level of service. cg wanted to keep this a hobby project and not owe anything to anyone.
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I understand and respect this but this site is not cheap to run =\
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...or ads. It is hard to believe that someone would run server for 4 years or so with their own pocket.
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I'm wondering how much of the operation costs the ads are able to cover.
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There is a banner on home page. If you don't see it, you are probably using adblocker like most of us ;__;
A bunch of ads will be annoying.
It may be a good idea to add SG to exceptions in your adblocker so it would help generate some revenue. 1 banner won't kill anyone.
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I know that, and I don't mind if they put some ads to pay for the upgraded server...
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We do run RAID. SSDs would be great, but we're only noticing the limitations of our current drives because the server doesn't have enough RAM, and the drives are busy performing all of these unnecessary reads, which they'll no longer be doing once the dataset fits entirely in RAM.
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Yes, I supposed you used RAID for security and better access times, but with SSDs the latency is ridiculous. I was thinking about the future, because there's a limit for RAM upgrade. Thanks for your response.
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Are you running this on a colocated server or a virtual server?
Because in the latter case, depending on your provider, ssd's shouldn't be too expensive and still have a noticeable performance gain.
Of course if it's your own colocated server, then SSD's would be a costly choice and not worth it for the time being, as long as your RAM can fit the dataset properly with some room for growth.
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I'd bet it is a dedicated server for the database only, or at least the new setup will be like that. One dedicated machine with a Xeon, 128GB of RAM and hard drives in RAID.
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eww what on earth is download more ram? does it really work? can i sell my own ram and get like 16gb for free from their site? :D
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Yes, you can.
You'll have to remove your own ram from your rig before attempting to get some from their site though.
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wow so it really works? and i cant combine it with my own ram, thats it? :P well its not like i cant google or reddit it, so ill do it after tonights champions league games, dont really have to bother you with so many questioons. Like do i keep my graphics card, and stuff.
nice site though :d ok i think we should stop here, someone will think its a real thing
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it says its a joke on the download page though ^_^
Was just curious how far it'd go
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I was one of these "bad" users which were checking "entered GA" page from time to time :D I feel guilty....
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You've likely been wondering why the site has been slow the past week. I've been wondering the same.
The Issue
Sluggish performance on the page displaying your past giveaway entries, and more recently, all pages. This seemed to occur primarily during peak hours, but also at what appeared to be random, during off-peak hours as well.
Why Is This Happening?
In short, we don't have enough ram to store our active dataset and indexes, so the site needs to occasionally read from disk. For example, a user attempts to view their giveaway entries from the past. Our server can't hold all of our giveaway entry information in our limited amount of ram, so this information would be read from disk. Scanning hundreds of millions of rows on disk to find the related data for a user is an incredibly slow process, and it might take 30+ seconds, when it should be taking 0.02 seconds if the data was available in ram. This explains why the page displaying your past giveaway entries would take a long time to load if you haven't accessed it in a while, since it would be reading from disk instead of ram.
Now, what about other pages, why has everything been slow lately? Well, the disks are so busy working overtime, trying to read the data for the above user, they're not available for other users browsing the site, and these users are left waiting, and waiting, and potentially timing out. If we had more ram available, the original user would be reading their data directly from ram, and the disks would be free for writes.
Solution
We need to download more ram. Our database server runs 24gb of ram at the moment, and that's far too low for our 60gb of data and indexes. I received a price today for upgrading to 128gb of ram, and we'll soon be going through with those upgrades. However, we need a short term solution so users can continue using the site before that happens. I ended up disabling the page for viewing your past giveaway entries. This keeps the hard drives from being a bottleneck and spending all of their time reading that information for a small number of users, when they need to focus on writes to the database for everyone else. It's peak hours right now, and you should notice the site being quite responsive, so I think this solution will work well until the ram upgrade.
Edit: The entered giveaway page will now show 100 of your past entries, in descending order. For performance reasons, this is the only way the results can be ordered and displayed until the server is upgraded, and full functionality can be restored.
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