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Post by absentfriend on Oct 16, 2022 19:46:16 GMT -5
Hello all. What I'm doing here is pushing out my notes for an article that was on SP Jimmy's site. It concerns how increasing the SG member cap had unintended consequences. This actually happened even if I embellished some bits to try to make reading it fun.
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Post by absentfriend on Oct 16, 2022 19:48:02 GMT -5
How the Insidious Dr. Twinkletits almost crashed a City of Heroes server.
By Absent Friend
Hello everyone! What follows is essentially a bug report. But it's a bug report that's going to wander around the back roads of my thought processes, such as they are, for a bit. And with a bit of luck it should be a fun read.
So we'll start much farther back than strictly needed and say that in City of Heroes, I have always loved Super Groups (SGs) and base raids. So when the Thunderspy server announced they were pursuing base raids I was all in. I already had a personal SG bouncing around, but mostly just out of old habits from live. So I petitioned the server owner Dr. Brain for a SG name change and became The Base Raiders VG. (VG= Villain Group or redside SG.) And then I started recruiting and growing.
And when I say recruiting, it was a daily thing with me. I just felt I was missing something if I didn't get at least 2 folks a day personally. And I let my members know they were free to invite to The Base Raiders as well. Now anyone that's run a SG can already tell you that some did and most didn't and that's perfectly normal. So that's how that name came to be on my VG roster.. Dr. Twinkletits.
I saw that name and thought to myself "THAT is a fucking AWESOME name!" and "Why didn't I come up with that?" I had to share this with co-workers and friends! Even those that didn't play City of Heroes agreed it was AWESOME and if they played, they would team with Dr. Twinkletits without hesitation.
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Post by absentfriend on Oct 16, 2022 19:49:11 GMT -5
Now I should say plainly I never actually saw Dr. Twinkletits ingame. And sadly there came a time when the character stopped logging in. Back then I normally kicked from the VG after 45 days or so of not logging in. But when Dr. Twinkletits time came I just couldn't bring myself to do it. That name was just To. Fucking. AWESOME. to disappear from my VG entirely. And I was also to fair-minded to kick anyone else out if I couldn't kick out the Dr.. "No big deal right now." I thought, "We aren't to the 150 character member cap yet. I can keep them around for a bit still."
Then the devs at Thunderspy increased the SG membership cap to 300 and I kept putting off cleaning out the deadwood. The VG was still growing because as part of our base raiding focus we had to collect Items of Power that gave benefits to members no one else could match. I let anyone in and didn't push any rules beyond what the server already had plus the focus gave us semi-regular activity to keep folks interested as well.
But there were starting to be some issues. One day our entire league mapserved suddenly and no one knew why. It happened twice more in rapid succession and we had to call off that night's activity as a result. We figured out that night it was somehow related to our SG channel chat because anyone who used it mapserved. The server reset for a patch about a day after that and it seemed to fix the problem. But it came back about 4-6 weeks later.
This time even a server reset didn't fix the issues. Anyone in The Base Raiders VG that night could only stay logged in for about a minute. Less if they tried SG chat. Characters not in the VG had no issues. Even had a character quit the VG (temporarily) and they had no issues. It was clear that for some unknown reason the VG was somehow using to many resources to keep functioning. Finally someone suggested counting how many members we had. Tally came in at 201. By now our Dr. Twinkletits was at 190 days without logging in. Over 6 months.
The suggestion was made to cut some members for the health of the server, but Dr. Twinkletits was such an AWESOME name... I had to think about this..( And right now there are folks screaming " YOU WHAT?!?" at their screen and I do not blame them for it.) Sadly there was no escaping the conclusion that if the server went down, then Dr. Twinkletits was effectively kicked anyway. So with a hand raised in salute and manly tears flowing freely I kicked Dr. Twinkletits and around 80 others and all was right with the server again.
So the TL;DR here is this. I'm pretty sure all City of Heroes servers essentially share the same SG code in many respects. Owing mainly to well documented issues about a lack of documentation, folks are wary about touching it. Please don't set your SG membership caps above 200 or it could cause significant issues.
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