Tag: service

Server Outages and Donations

Just thought I’d do a quick post on the stability of this server, given the hours of downtime today.

Long story short, one of the cronjob tasks that goes through and closes expired orders for EVE Metrics did so, then crashed and burned quite rapidly, chewing up all the RAM on the server and expertly smashing some queries into MySQL which promptly made MySQL cough up blood and fall over. Several uncacheable SQL-heavy API calls to EVE Metrics later and Apache became inundated with slow-completing requests and started spawning more threads, so on and so forth, and there goes the server. What _should_ have happened is that the process resource monitor script should have caught the rake task eating a gig of RAM and killed that, but for some reason I’m still trying to work out it didn’t. In either case, the server is now back up and stable again.

I run this server entirely out of my own pocket for services I provide to the community, and with the exception of one person who bought a GTC through the link on this site, I don’t get any financial aid on that front. So for now, a single point of failure is the way it’ll have to be unless I can convince my host to provide me with a second server and load balancer for free 🙂

If you’re an ISKsense-using site, then I do apologise when ISKsense javascript includes never load, and I am trying to work out a solution in javascript which will avoid that by rendering some predefined ads if it can’t pull the JS down in 2 seconds or so. As for CLGS and so on, there’s not much I can do other than to keep this server ticking along as happily as I can with all the applications it’s running. Needless to say I’ve been pretty busy over the past few days, and keeping close eyes on my server has taken second priority against keeping close eyes on the Entirely Harmless gangs floating around Fade in the past week 🙂

If you want to help me manage costs and improve my stability, then buying GTCs via the link on this blog is a good way to go about that; alternatively, feel free to donate via the link on the sidebar, where I’ve set up a Pledgie campaign for the donations. Every little helps (Unless it’s a really little chunk in which case PayPal will steal all of it and give me pennies, which aren’t very useful), so please do donate. Anything left over at the end of each month will be donated to Cancer Research UK rather than being spent on mroe bree.

Corporation Logo Server

Given that there’s a lot of people who are just end-users and who don’t care much for tinkering with things under-the-hood in their applications, I’ve set up a server which will allow you to get the corporation logo for a given corporation easily- by making a simple GET request. Heck, simply using this in an image tag is fine by me, though obviously client-side caching is always good. Simply use the URL below.

http://clg.eve-metrics.com/<corporationID>.png
Example: http://clg.eve-metrics.com/853748831.png

Nice and simple, no?

There’s just one caveat- this currently only works for corporations in alliances. The API has some very odd ideas about letting out-of-alliance corps have their corporation sheets grabbed, meaning I can’t retrieve shape data from those corporations. I have made a bug report to CCP, and I’ll keep you updated when/if this gets fixed. In the meantime, I’ve got a workaround- visit the CLG website and you can submit your limited key and user ID to add your corporation’s logos to the database.

I’m making no charge for this service, though of course donations in ISK are hugely appreciated if you use this. If you’re a heavy user and want to start using this, please drop me a line first.

One other thing you might want to know if you’re caching- this will actually redirect you with a 302 error code. This means that your average request doesn’t even need to hit the extremely light Rack application which generates the images if the file’s there already, thus making my server and your response times both happier things. It shouldn’t make any difference, but I’m mentioning it just in case.

If you cook up any mods or tools to use this (I’d love to see an EDK mod to add this) do let me know and I’ll drop a link in this post. Edit: There’s an EDK mod in the works! Woot!