Zip...crash!

It is no secret that the site has not been too stable lately. And it is no secret that I have not been making many updates lately :) Real life unfortunately getting in the way of fun as always!

The problem with the site crashing is that the game data is stored in XML which is then Zipped up to save space. This was an experiment on my part to see if this would be more efficient for storing lots of data that is infrequently accessed than putting the data into a database which is optimized for frequent data access. This would also allow for easier distribution of the files at some point -- some files could be on the server, others could be "in the cloud" (as they say). Whereas with a traditional (non Azure) MS SQL database, it all needs to be in one place.

If I were to do it again though, I don't think I would do it this way. The problem is that something is corrupting the game data on occasion when the data is being saved and zipped. Then when it goes to unzip the data the next time, it complains that it fails it's CRC check. This corruption seems to poison the .Net appdomain and it eventually crashes requiring a manual reset.

I am not quite willing to rewrite the whole game data storage engine at this point though. So I have updated to the latest version of the DotNetZip Library and modified the code a bit to detect when the zip file is corrupted and attempt to automatically repair it.

Hopefully this will cut down on the amount of corrupt game data and as a result make the appdomain crash less frequently making the site more stable.

Hopefully.

...and we're back!

I am very sorry for the very long outage. It looks like the site was down for about a month -- May 25th to June 25th due to a variety of problems.

First, something happened with the hosting provider that meant that the web pages could not access the database which brought the site down. I could not even access the database from my development computer or from the tools provided by the hosting provider. It seemed to be some kind of permissions issue.

Second, Google for some reason disabled my email account and the blog without explanation.

Third, it's not much of a secret that I haven't been logging in to the site with much frequency lately so I didn't notice that it was down. You were all of course emailing me that it was down, but I didn't get any email because my gmail account for the game was down.

Anyway, it's all straightened out now. The site is back up, and hopefully you will all come back and keep playing. I have temporarily disabled the service that deletes games due to inactivity so that it doesn't go delete all these games that haven't had a turn in 30 days.

Thanks for sticking around and/or coming back. I will try to be on the site more and maybe even do some development on it from time to time :)