The Energon Pub

[Silver Wind]

I counted my team view page and yeah it's now up to around 48 entries per character.

[Silver Wind]

I have had six characters complete their missions as of 8:26 PM PDT.

There is no mission log, and all participants are flagged as receiving no experience points nor energon (due to the former).

Edit: Forgot to include an example for those unfamiliar. https://www.seibertron.com/heavymetalwar/view_mission.php?mission_id=332716

[Glyph]

Looks like that was a temporary glitch, thankfully - the linked mission is showing up with full log and XP totals for me, so apparently the mission was processed and written to the DB properly. Possibly just processed late?

On the team view / high scores, I see we're up to 52 rows per character now. Assuming that it's ticking up every hour as we think, I guess it'll give us an easy way to track exactly how long the bug has existed...

[steve2275]

I would say something odd happened here, and it's not just these two its the entire team there are so many of them.

https://www.seibertron.com/heavymetalwa ... hp?id=1138
3 days later still here

[ashe5k]

I would say something odd happened here, and it's not just these two its the entire team there are so many of them.

https://www.seibertron.com/heavymetalwa ... hp?id=1138
3 days later still here

I counted 153 instances of my main guy in there. I didn't count the rest of my team.

[Glyph]

153 / 24 = 6 days and change - yup, sounds right.

[Psycho Warrior]

I was just about to report this and saw other people are having this problem too. its on every team page I visit.

[Glyph]

Yeah, we're up to about 300 rows per bot on the team view now, and the high score table is adding a little over a thousand rows every hour. Needless to say, this is only going to keep getting worse until it's fixed - team view is already long since unusable and slow to load, and the high score table is going to eventually cause storage and/or performance issues for the site as a whole. Though at least it's only adding active bots each time it refreshes, not duplicating the entire list of every bot ever created - that would be a crazy runaway increase.

I don't know exactly how the backend code changed in the recent updates from the version I'm familiar with, but I'd be willing to bet it's a one-line fix.

@Ryan - happy to work with you on this & the other persistent bugs if needed.

[Glyph]

Went to check again just for the hell of it, team roster table is so large I had to use the console window to query the page elements rather than count. 1,044 rows per bot. High score table is over half a million rows now.

[Drop Bear]

Went to check again just for the hell of it, team roster table is so large I had to use the console window to query the page elements rather than count. 1,044 rows per bot. High score table is over half a million rows now.

Maybe I’m being dramatic, but I don’t find HMW to be playable now. I like to check the team page regularly to see how my crew are going, but ever since this issue has occurred, it’s become far too much of a hassle to do so. And it won’t be long before that hassle evolves into something more serious.

[Silver Wind]

I recommend avoiding the team view page at this point. The page for mine responded so slowly I was concerned the browser tab would freeze.

[steve2275]

indeed

[-Soundwave-]

I recommend avoiding the team view page at this point. The page for mine responded so slowly I was concerned the browser tab would freeze.

It urks me. I play from the bottom up, and I can't see where my 10s are in my 11s....

[Seibertron]

I cleaned up some code, mostly database queries that were showing up in the slow database query log. I've always hated the name "Registry". I changed it to the "War Room". Fixed the bug with the amount of active Transformers on your squad as well. Have fun.

[Seibertron]

Went to check again just for the hell of it, team roster table is so large I had to use the console window to query the page elements rather than count. 1,044 rows per bot. High score table is over half a million rows now.

Maybe I’m being dramatic, but I don’t find HMW to be playable now. I like to check the team page regularly to see how my crew are going, but ever since this issue has occurred, it’s become far too much of a hassle to do so. And it won’t be long before that hassle evolves into something more serious.

Which page is the team roster table on that you are talking about?

[-Soundwave-]

Which page is the team roster table on that you are talking about?

https://www.seibertron.com/heavymetalwa ... p?id=19368

There have been so many that it doesn't load anymore at least not for me. It's just a blank white page.

[Glyph]

It's /team_view.php - but as we figured out upthread, the bug isn't on the team view page itself but in the once-per-hour cron job that refreshes the high score table (was game_character_rank, I don't know if that's changed). It should truncate the table before inserting the new set of results, but it became clear that the cron job had stopped doing that and was just appending the new rows instead.


Please note, it's nothing to do with character or mission data anywhere else, please don't do anything to those in the hopes of fixing it! I'm doing some history work on missions at the moment and really don't want to lose that data.

[Seibertron]

It's /team_view.php - but as we figured out upthread, the bug isn't on the team view page itself but in the once-per-hour cron job that refreshes the high score table (was game_character_rank, I don't know if that's changed). It should truncate the table before inserting the new set of results, but it became clear that the cron job had stopped doing that and was just appending the new rows instead.


Please note, it's nothing to do with character or mission data anywhere else, please don't do anything to those in the hopes of fixing it! I'm doing some history work on missions at the moment and really don't want to lose that data.

Thank you for that direction. I am debugging the code currently as I think I isolated the problem.

[Seibertron]

Here you go: https://www.seibertron.com/heavymetalwar/high.php

[Glyph]

Nice, looks like that's fixed the team view page and I take it the high score is now fully refreshing in the hourly script

Although... looks like the high scores aren't actually ordered by character XP at the moment. I can't figure out what the ordering is from the table, although it does look like more recently active bots are towards the end? But it's definitely not by score. Sorry Ryan, can we grab a little more of your time please?

[Seibertron]

Nice, looks like that's fixed the team view page and I take it the high score is now fully refreshing in the hourly script

Although... looks like the high scores aren't actually ordered by character XP at the moment. I can't figure out what the ordering is from the table, although it does look like more recently active bots are towards the end? But it's definitely not by score. Sorry Ryan, can we grab a little more of your time please?

I modified the insert statement so that it no longer sorted the data since the data can be sorted from the database table. Let me take another look.

[Seibertron]

How should they be ranked? By experience in descending order? I put the order by statement back in the hourly task, but would like to remove that for a database boost and just use the database indexing instead from the ranks db table.

[Glyph]

Ah, I see. Yeah, that was what drove the 'rank' number as I recall, which then gets used to order the display table and pulled into to the character page and the team view table. They were ranked in descending order of XP (as score), with the character_name as a tiebreaker (though these days I'd use the character ID instead since it's numeric).

Was that query one that showed up in the slow queries log? I have a couple of old versions of it since it was a problem back in the day too, one with a calc-rows function to get the rank and one just using an auto-increment ID as the rank but inserting in score order. If it's using the window function, they're notorious for speed issues, but either way adding an index on (hmw_character.score, hmw_character.character_name) might help if it doesn't already have one.

If I was writing the function from scratch today (caveat for not knowing exactly how everything is currently set up in the site DB, obviously) I'd do the second version: truncate hmw_character_rank then insert sorted with an auto-increment, using an index on hmw_character to sort them efficiently. (Also if rank is the PK on hmw_character_ranks, it needs an index on character_id as well since the character pages search by that field)

[Seibertron]

It has indexes. one of the problems that was causing an error was the character_name field in ranks was 20 characters long, but the character_name field in the characters table was 30 characters. the query would fail when it got to character names with length greater than 20. there were some other issues as well with the queries. I also added a unique key for character ID as well and updated the query to be REPLACE instead of INSERT. All seems good.

I had to do HMW work today because all of this server and code work that I've been doing over the past 2.5 months is like peeling an onion ... each new layer uncovers new issues to resolve. The fact that I've worked through so many things on the server and in the code means that it is now clearer to see what needs to be resolved in HMW.

I also updated registry to War Room and added some new click functionality so that you guys don't have to just click on the checkbox. you should be able to click on the character's box to turn them active or inactive. At some point, i'll just get rid of the active an inactive sections and just have it active or inactive in the same table and the page will just have code that runs in the background and won't need to be submitted any more. it'll just toggle their status (or if you guys prefer to have two different sections of bots like it's been for 21 years, that's fine too, and I'll just figure out a way to have them slide between the sections).

Lots of things planned for later this year. The Silver Age of SEIBERTRON is coming soon!

[Glyph]

I also updated registry to War Room and added some new click functionality so that you guys don't have to just click on the checkbox. you should be able to click on the character's box to turn them active or inactive.

I noticed, and appreciated it greatly

At some point, i'll just get rid of the active an inactive sections and just have it active or inactive in the same table and the page will just have code that runs in the background and won't need to be submitted any more. it'll just toggle their status (or if you guys prefer to have two different sections of bots like it's been for 21 years, that's fine too, and I'll just figure out a way to have them slide between the sections).

TBH, I think the current layout works fine. If we're doing sky-is-the-limit though, how about removing the active/inactive distinction completely and having the relevant pages (missions/arena) do the checks to say you can't have more than X bots doing stuff at the same time? 'cos bots being active/inactive doesn't save any processing time and is just unnecessary clicks IMO - and since that's literally the only thing the RegistryWar Room page does, it could be got rid of and default to the team view instead which already shows all bots together in one section and just labels their active status.