Hey everyone,

We’ll be doing maintenance on our web server on Sunday, April 29 at around 3pm EDT. The app will probably be unreachable for about 10-15 minutes over that time. We apologize for the inconvenience and we’ll be sure to get it back up as quickly as possible.

Feel free to let me know if you have questions.

Thanks for keeping us posted!

10-15mins for maintenance. thats fast. our releases usually take a weekend

Dark theme for supporters?

04:47AM... notification... Forgot to mute the phone yesterday... but for @dfox this and more 😂 good night people

@Paramite website

@Paramite I guess

4am for me, so np for me
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wait, I have to wake up at 4am to go to the airport!!!!!!!!

I need dR at that time..... (sobs)

@Paramite THIS IS THE LEGENDARY KITTEN IMAGE BOIS

https://devrant.com/static/devrant/...

Haha, unfortunately there will be no cat meme because the web server is what’s being upgraded, rather than usual database maintenance which means the web server can still serve static content. In this case, the site/api will unfortunately be completely inaccessible.

@dfox if you are upgrading webserver that means devRant is getting more traffic?

@py2js partially - while the current web server can handle the traffic, it’s really began to run really slowly for avatar building/image processing because that’s pretty CPU/memory intensive. I’m hoping the upgrade will help since there will be more memory/cores available, but I’m not sure.

I’m not exactly sure why image processing slowed down. It could be because of a few things - increased traffic/utilization on the server itself, but I also wonder if DigitalOcean lowered the quality of the CPUs in their new instance offerings. Hopefully though the upgrade will help.

@dfox
maybe you can put the calculation in devices, distribute it among users
I mean each device can calculate it's own avatar, so server will be free of these kind of calculations

I wonder if I can survive that long 🤔

@tinybyte that would be great, that means we could also add custom things on our desk because there is no check..

@Codex404
actually there can be checksums to validate the pic

@tinybyte all random possibilities have to be precalculated first to get a checksum. Its easier to do this on the fly and store each already used combination on the server. That way only the unique combination will be slower rendered because the second time its used its restored from the disk.

That means we get a meme right?

@ewpratten nope :'(

Good luck at slaying bugs

Hm... You can't "bake" the images to avoid recalculations of profile images?

@Paramite you're being awkward as fuck 😂😂

@NotFound I think caching them would be easiest, because its not bound to a person as suggested on github yet, so if the user changes his hair etc. it'll just change the url, so you wont even need to cache release anything @dfox

The avatar system already relies heavily on caching. The main problem is the actual avatar building, which results in combinations of avatars being created that haven’t been created before so there isn’t anything cached. The process of overlaying the images seems to be using a lot of CPU. There’s so many combinations it’s impossible to cache each one before they are entered.

The operation isn’t so crazy that it should have to take as long as it was. Upgrading our web server from 4 cores to 6 cores seems to have significantly improved the speed of the avatar builder. I am going to try one more thing (compare 6 cpu server to a CPU-optimized 2 CPU server to see if maybe the avatar image process behaves better on those optimized CPUs.

@dfox 6 cores for that, wow :/
By the way not sure if you already do it, but separating avatar code from the main service wouldn't that help?

There are lots of requests to the server especially if someone keeps website open all day.

You know better bro just thought I'd pitch in with an idea

@gitpush separating the services is what I’m trying to do now. I’m hoping the avatar/image generation stuff will run better on a CPU optimized instance so trying that now!

@dfox best of luck 😀
You still going with Digital Ocean right?

@gitpush thanks - I’ll post a comment here when it’s switched over, hopefully a good speed improvement will be obvious.

Yeah, still DigitalOcean.

@dfox great, I'm also wondering how bad was it, I did notice it isn't fast but it isn't too slow either, how much does a user change his avatar here 😅

The avatar builder should be much faster now!

@dfox now that makes me actually wonder if not generating the image and then just always serving it, would aggressively reduce the cpu cost? those would be of course cached and then just released if a user updates it

also I think rant views load faster now, probably the avatars took the most of the long load before

edit: nvm it couldnt have been, because then a lot of users would have had to change their avatars to unique combinations a lot for that to be the reason