A couple of months back we worked with E-ON to put an advert in the magazine as well as running a login screen advert, and this has now run. So for a few days anyone logging into EVE will have been greeted with this fine advert created by Zapatero at MMM Publishing.

Of course, this suddenly meant more people going to and using the site. Fortunately one of the primary concerns when myself and Makurid put EM2 and later EM3 together was scalability. Whereas EM1 would’ve fallen over and died, EM3 has soldiered on like a champ. The only intervention we’ve had to perform was to fix the API processor, which was hanging regularly and causing problems as a result. That’s fixed, and we’re now stable and responsive. So, of course, we now have some numbers! These are the statistics for the most recent 30 days as of this post.

• ~85,000 visits
• ~500,000 page views
• ~5 pages per visit
• ~29,000 unique visitors
• ~1,500 additional account registrations as a result of login screen advert (Above ~20 account registrations per day baseline)

In terms of the site’s dataset, we’re getting fairly huge.

• 6,000 EVE API keys, of which 4,000 are full keys
• 75,000 EVE API methods enabled
• 32,000 EVE API calls per hour (about 10 every second)
• 75,000 characters (includes characters noted in market and other data)
• 15,000,000 wallet journal entries
• 6,300,000 wallet transactions
• 200,000 EVE Mails
• 1,600,000 active market orders
• 6,400,000 EVE API loaded trades
• 52,000,000 Inferred trades
• 11,000,000 processed uploads
• 146,000,000,000 total skillpoints of loaded characters
• 4,100,000,000,000 total ISK of loaded characters

Which is… scary. But! We’ve grown hugely (a threefold increase in requests per second) and we’re still performing well. The site is not throwing errors, users are generally happy with their experience with the site, and we’re stable – no crashes, no fires breaking out, no climbing resource usage. Our caching and design philosophies have worked well and the extra effort invested earlier in development has really paid off. We’ve just handled a huge amount of growth with no effort at all. I’d estimate we’re good to around 12,000-15,000 users on our current hardware.

Of course, we’re now wondering what to do. I stopped playing EVE long ago aside from the odd spot of tinkering, but I’ve even let accounts lapse and stopped updating my skill queue as of a month or two ago. Makurid’s just started playing again recently. We’re not really heavily invested in EM in terms of motivation, other than making a cool webapp.

Capsuleer, as I’m sure many of you know, is an EVE iPhone app that recently shut down because it couldn’t be monetized and the time and money invested in it by the developers was simply unreasonable. A couple of weeks back I was looking at the realities of what EM costs to run, and what it costs in terms of time to maintain. And the logistics of, if needed, shutting the site down. This is still somewhat in my mind but the site will be sticking around for a little while yet. I’m very much hoping CCP will come to their senses in terms of how they choose to support third party developers (a free account subscription appears to be the greatest gift given by CCP, but that’s a far cry from the ~£130 per month it costs to run EVE Metrics – and that’s just our costs _now_, not including new hardware costs or upgrade costs. If we grow much more we’re going to be looking at ~£200/mo to run EM, possibly more). Advertising isn’t an option, and donations have failed every time we’ve tried to support ourselves with them. Timecode sale affiliations barely made a mark on my accounting sheets. We do enjoy writing sites and producing something big that people find useful, but there are certain realities to be faced – both myself and Makurid are students, with no full-time jobs. I’ve recently picked up some part time work which means I can now afford to buy bacon on a weekly basis again.

In the meantime we will continue to support the EVE community by maintaining EVE Metrics. We’re working on the codebase right now to upgrade it to the latest and greatest Rails release and Makurid’s beavering away at the API processor to split it up into a puller and a processor, enabling us to achieve much higher throughput on API calls to CCP’s (slow) servers. Now that we’ve breached 30,000 requests per hour, that 10 request per second figure is actually beyond our capacity right now because of our single-threaded processor/puller mechanism. This is actually a CCP limit- we just need to work around it by hitting them with more requests simultaneously, thus spreading our load over multiple servers on their end. I’ll also be making performance and usability improvements wherever I can and incorporating as many bug reports as possible into what we release. This will likely be a slowish process, but in the long run, it should be worth it. The question really is, will CCP make it worthwhile for us to be investing our time and energy into longer term planning?

All you need to do is head over to EVE Metrics, log in (or sign up if you’ve not got an account yet), add your API key(s) if you haven’t already, and then enable the EVE mail API method. And voila- EVE mails, in your browser, updated as often as CCP lets us.

The icing on the cake is that we’ve also provided a feed for RSS readers for your EVE mails. Google Reader/iGoogle or any other ATOM-compatible reader (which is basically all of them) can now monitor your ingame EVE mails at the click of a button.

We’ve also gotten around to doing skill training- you can see what you’re training (queue support of course is included) on all your accounts.

The next logical step from here is notification support- get an email or SMS whenever your characters can train a new skill, whenever you get a new EVE mail, whenever one of your market orders is outbid or fullfilled. You name it, I’d love to see it notifiable. We’re still in the early days with that, but that’s where we’d like for that to end up.

We’ll be improving on these and implementing other APIs in the coming days- we want to get notifications loading for all you corporate types, and we’re looking forward to bringing more skill monitoring/information into the UI. I’ve got a lot of ideas bubbling around- we’re getting to the point where we’ve got loads of little snippets of data that can all tie in with each other, creating something really fantastic for you guys and girls, the users. And that’s awesome.

Of course, we need your help to make all this run smoothly and perform well, which it has problems doing at the moment. We’re still asking for donations here, you can buy GTCs in support of us here, and we’ve just opened up advertising on the site through Project Wonderful. Any form of help is hugely appreciated.

On a personal note, I’m starting a course in Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London in a week’s time. As a result I’ve been running around sorting out accomodation and so on rather than writing blogs. I’ve been spending the rest of my time working (the sort that pays), and the tiny little nooks and crannies of spare time are crammed with work on EVE Metrics 2.

In the past week I also received some donated server hardware; this will be taking residence in my new home and hopefully in the future the cluster will be spending most of it’s CPU cycles doing reports and more complicated econometrics using the EVE Metrics dataset- stuff that takes way too long to do online, but is achievable offline.

Anyway, back to business. Read on for the lowdown on EM2.1, new features, new uploader info and more!

EVE Metrics 2.1, the API release, is a bit off schedule. We were hoping to have it done last weekend, but events have conspired against us. We’re 70% there on the bug tracker but it’s more like 95% in terms of time; the majority of the remaining tasks involve some of the finer points of the upload reward system (which has involved so far hours of Makurid poring over data and projections in MATLAB) and that whole front-end thing. On release, 2.1 will let you view market orders and wallet transactions/journal entries online, and the market orders will be autoloaded into the database.

Trades and an improved uploader

Those of you who are heavy EM users will have known for some time the ‘trading’ tab has been inactive. 2.1 opens that, allowing you to view all our inferred trade data. We’ll be adding in the API-aquired trade data sometime soon after release but it’s not in yet. By inferred data, we mean trades we can infer have occurred by looking at how orders change between uploaded datasets; it’s far from perfect but it’s a good indicator and can be useful.

There’s one other notable thing we have planned for 2.1/2.2- 2.1 will introduce OAuth, and 2.2 will fully implement it including components of the OpenSocial API to provide widgets for both iGoogle and AvatarsUnited. This is part of a partnership between MMMetrics and EnemyUnknown, and we’re very excited to see how we can make the market more of a social tool through these widgets and using social networking technologies. What we will have through API data in EM2 is a lot of useful information about how people trade, allowing us to develop better systems, algorithms and predictions about the market in the future.

What OAuth also means, though, is that we finally have a way to securely link API applications with EVE Metrics. This opens up the possibility of personal API feeds but also gives us a better way to do the uploader. So what we’ll be publishing in the near future is a new uploader, with total support for Mac and Linux as well as Windows. We’re still working out the technicalities and helping to develop some of the technologies involved (libevecache etc) to make the uploader as lightweight and fast as possible while being even more efficient and secure for uploading fantastic data. When we release the new uploader we’ll also be opening the upload protocol specification to let you lot make your own clients if you want to.

Realtime with RabbitMQ, plus feature creep!

One of the most-requested features for EVE Metrics has always been the real-time upload feed. We think email is the wrong way to go about this. It’s not designed for it, it’s overcomplex to parse, it’s a lot of overhead, etc. So we’re going for a more modern solution- a messaging queue based on AMQP and RabbitMQ. We’ll be providing example clients in Ruby and hopefully a few other languages, so if the technicalities escape you there’s no problem. But the point is, it’s fast, resilient, easy to use, and lightweight. Technical details and code samples will come later, of course.

And last but certainly not least, we will be putting new features in. That means trading tools, favourite-based price lists, UI changes to the item display page, and more. As ever, if you want features, hit the ‘feedback’ link on the site and tell us. Not everything will be coming out with 2.1; it’s mostly a framework release, with some very large changes to authentication and lots of new stuff in the market code, plus of course API support. New features will be coming on a more regular basis after that; once we’ve got the basics done, features are often pretty simple in comparison.

Pictures speak a thousand words

Which, incidentally, is roughly the length of this blog post. Speaking of posts- an article I wrote back in 2008 on delayed_job has been published in Rails Magazine issue 4! If you’re interested in background processing, you might want to give it a read.

Anyway, I promised pictures, so here you have the servers, plus some of my latest purchase, a fantastic DT109 headset.

[imagebrowser id=2]