Can the GAF servers handle E3?

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antitrop said:
By June you will be a Member. You will be a Member on May 22nd, provided you're on your best behavior.

Junior -> Member is 300 posts/3 months, although some unfortunate souls never make it out of their probationary status.
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*joined November 7, 2012*
*has 285 posts*

...Crap. I didn't know that time was also a factor. I thought that you simply had to get to 300 posts. ._.
 
Was GAF ever able to handle E3 traffic? No and with two new consoles coming up this E3, no way in hell is GAF going to handle it.
Sorry Evilore.
 
pharmboy044 said:
Was GAF ever able to handle E3 traffic? No and with two new consoles coming up this E3, no way in hell is GAF going to handle it.
Sorry Evilore.
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As others have said, E3 2011 was fine. It went down in the PS4 conference because of a physical failure, not an overload failure:

EviLore said:
We had a really awful combination, today, of unprecedented traffic (expected, of course) and the physical failure of one of our database servers at the worst possible time. We're on 50% power with the database servers right now. Keep in mind that each one of them is really strong, but we hit an i/o hard wall during the conference and shortly after because of that. Entire internet was spamming F5.

I'm having gromph redeploy our database tomorrow to even more powerful servers, essentially the most ridiculous array possible, no expense spared to round out any possible weakness, to try to prepare us better for what's to come.

Major, major disappointment that we were down for almost the entire conference. It would be great if we could use an elastic solution to dynamically address load with no upper limit, like Amazon EC2, but apparently that's not viable for our setup.
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And as for the recent problems:

EviLore said:
We were hit by another severe DDoS attack a couple days ago and had to null route the IP for an hour or so, and today the webhost had some sort of critical power failure and needed to take some of the boxes offline to undergo maintenance for about two hours. We stayed up for most of it but without all the systems online the site went down for a while.

So there's the explanation. I'm pissed off any time we go down, but very little is within our control regarding the recent outages and we have a tremendous amount of server resources on hand. That's not the issue.

E3, well, I'll probably have Gromph temporarily expand the server array...double it, if necessary...for the conferences, just to increase the chances of success. Keep in mind that we're hitting quite a bit of growth and this is not a news site or blog with static content and media offloaded straightforwardly to a CDN. We're an extremely intensive database.
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I don't think there should be any doubt that the system can handle the load (Things like Who Quoted Me, search, avatars, and OT at worse) can be changed or taken offline to cope. If GAF falls at E3 then it will be some hardware or facility failure, not a computational failure.

Gaf is an 80 Xeon core, 124GB+ machine. Source 1 2.
 
No chance. I'll be F5'ing loads though to get some posts, haha.

The site was crashing hardcore during the boston capture on Friday.
 
Poltergust said:
*joined November 7, 2012*
*has 285 posts*

...Crap. I didn't know that time was also a factor. I thought that you simply had to get to 300 posts. ._.
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I didn't know you needed to reach a number of posts to lose Junior status. Seems like a policy that would encourage spam or just saying stupid shit to reach the post quota.

Anyway, I don't think locking out lurkers would help. That's lost revenue, and at probably a better margin than members (afterall, lurkers don't post so less bandwidth). All we can do is keep calm and not mash F5/post stupid "omg" shit.
 
This will be my first E3 with gaf (even though I made this account in 2011). I didn't realize how great and fun this place was until a couple of months back.
 
Caerith said:
I didn't know you needed to reach a number of posts to lose Junior status. Seems like a policy that would encourage spam or just saying stupid shit to reach the post quota.
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Yeah, I'm more of a "sit back and observe" kind of guy. I've actually been on NeoGAF most days since I've joined; I just don't post often.

If I knew about this "time limit", I would have definitely been more active in my posting (which, honestly, can be a bad thing, like you said). =/
 
Poltergust said:
Yeah, I'm more of a "sit back and observe" kind of guy. I've actually been on NeoGAF most days since I've joined; I just don't post often.

If I knew about this "time limit", I would have definitely been more active in my posting (which, honestly, can be a bad thing, like you said). =/
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Just to be clear, you have to of had a profile for 3 months, you are at 8 months right now. So 12 more posts and you will be a member, able to make threads.

Not 300 posts in 3 months, which the original post could be misconstrued as.
 
Poltergust said:
Yeah, I'm more of a "sit back and observe" kind of guy. I've actually been on NeoGAF most days since I've joined; I just don't post often.

If I knew about this "time limit", I would have definitely been more active in my posting (which, honestly, can be a bad thing, like you said). =/
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Same here, I'm on GAF every day and rarely post.

This is going to be my first time at E3, does anyone have any tips on how to best approach the convention. Alsp I'm gonna be in LA for the whole week, so any places worth visiting?
 
Noks415 said:
Same here, I'm on GAF every day and rarely post.

This is going to be my first time at E3, does anyone have any tips on how to best approach the convention. Alsp I'm gonna be in LA for the whole week, so any places worth visiting?
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You chose quite the year to attend E3 ;). This will be my third time going. There is no real approach. To be perfectly honest you will probably see and play everything you want by the third day. Best advice is to go to what you want to see most then go down the list. By the second day you will see everything you really want to see. As a matter of fact by the third day everyone starts to leave early. Which helps if for some reason you haven't seen absolutely everything you want.

The Santa Monica pier is pretty nice place to chill. Universal City/Studios is also fun to drive around to and look at all the movie studios. Other then that E3 will probably be your main focus the entire trip.
 
Toppot said:
Just to be clear, you have to of had a profile for 3 months, you are at 8 months right now. So 12 more posts and you will be a member, able to make threads.

Not 300 posts in 3 months, which the original post could be misconstrued as.
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Oh, so is that how it works? That's good... I was getting a bit worried there haha.
 
Poltergust said:
Yeah, I'm more of a "sit back and observe" kind of guy. I've actually been on NeoGAF most days since I've joined; I just don't post often.

If I knew about this "time limit", I would have definitely been more active in my posting (which, honestly, can be a bad thing, like you said). =/
Click to expand...

Yea, same here. It's almost been 5 years since I joined, but I'm still not even halfway to the post quota required to lose my Junior status, despite reading Gaf nearly everyday. But yea, it's 300 posts or 3 months, whichever comes later, so don't worry about spamming it up :P.
 
They usually disable avatars and maybe community section will have to go this time. I don't even know if they were up last e3. I do know avatars were gone though.
 
Wario64 said:
Do people still use GAF only during the livestreams? These past couple years I just used Twitter to post quick reactions. But I guess it doesn't work well if you aren't too connected with people
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I've used Facebook during the livestreams for a couple of years now. We discuss about the reveals among friends.
 
Never understood why the servers are so crappy. I mean We know GAF is making money, so, why not rent solid servers to handle the user load ?
 
Shutting down the gifs and avatarsvsounds like a pretty good solution that would still allow GAF to stay online and allow for the maximum amount of hits. I think we could do without a dozen Ron Paul "Its Happening"'gifs everytime a big announcement is made during one of the conferences if it allows for GAF to remain functional.
 
Tyler seems to prepare and upgrade for the onslaught every year, even shuts down the subforums (off topic, community etc)...

yet it's never enough.
 
There's a reason "GAF goes down" is the free space on the E3 bingo boards.

JonStark said:
Never understood why the servers are so crappy. I mean We know GAF is making money, so, why not rent solid servers to handle the user load ?
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Because for a finite amount of money, you can buy a finite amount of servers, and the E3 load is way over what makes sense to have for the entire rest of the year. Even though upgrades to the servers in preparation always seem to happen, it's never enough.

Actually, I think the servers survived 2011 for some reason, but I don't remember why.
 
I don't believe it will handle fellow GAFfer.

Guru Meditation or similar will happen.

PS4 Meeting on Feb. 20th melted GAF, I will expect the same from E3.
 
E3 feels so far away yet it's about 7 weeks away. I really wish MSFT would have went through with original rumored conference this week. Would of made the wait to 5/21 and E3 not feel so far away. If Sony has a small conference next month too, this some exciting times to be a gamer.
 
zPl8NAF.png
 
You still seeing Database Errors?

Missing Avatars?
 
No, and it's pretty pathetic. Been here for 8+ years and its always been plagued by performance issues. I say pathetic because there is no excuse anymore.
 
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