Shoutbox

Hello everyone,

I'm back from my vacation, I'm sick and my web site is still down . However, it's good to see all the support you continue to give me and I thank you for that. I plan to continue working on the final release of Messenger Plus! during next weeks and, even if I'm reading your suggestions, keep in mind that there won't be much (but still, there will be some) new features for the final. I prefer to concentrate on bugs in order to give you a good and professional software, reliable, that you can trust and that do not crash Messenger in any circumstances (talking about that, I would really appreciate if you could participate to the poll, it's more important that you could imagine).

I'm now asking for your help for two things. The first one concerns my server patchou.com. As you have seen, it is down for 3 weeks now and it's hurting Messenger Plus! in different ways. I've tried to pay a lot of money to get a good server back online (by the way, I give BIG THANKS to www.superwebhost.com for their understanding and support.. if you search a host, sign-up with them) while I was in France but it did no good. For that reason, I would like all of you to carefull read this request and talk to your friends about it if you think they could help: the reason why patchou.com is down is a combination of the populary of Messenger Plus! and my stupidity . As you may know, Messenger Plus! 2.0 has an auto-update feature that is supposed to connect every week on patchou.com to see if a new version is available. However, when the connection cannot be done, the software tried again after 5 minutes, again and again... since the release of the first beta, I estimate about 200,000 people downloaded the new version which is fantastic but which also causes a big problem... patchou.com being down, about 40,000 people every minute try to connect to check for an update, which means that I can't put the server back online with any host... it would instantly flood their server and ban me from their services. For that reason, as I cannot pay $200/month for a robust server, I'm asking anyone who can to lend me a portion of his servers for two or three days. My plan is simple: find a reboust server that can host patchou.com for a very short time; inform everyone that an update for Messenger Plus! is available; this update will simply deactivate auto-udpdate once for all; after most people are upgraded, I'll be able to put back my own server safely without risking any problem. So I do not need much bandwidth but a server that can accept a big number of hits during a few hours. If you know anyone that can help, please ask them to send me a private message on this forum. As soon as it's done, a lot of my problems willl be solved and I'll be able to resume the development of Messenger Plus!.

Wow... big post... so I'll be quick for my second requerst: I would like one of the moderators to send me an email (you're supposed to have my email if you're a mod ) with a lot of all the bugs (only those who make sense of course) reported since Messenger Plus! 2.00 was released along with the associated post texts and, very important, the emails of the people who reported the bug of confirmed it (dont be afraid everyone, your email is accessible only by the moderators of this forum). The reason for that is that I have to have a direct conversation with all these people in order to be able to solve the bugs. Please do that as soon as you can (for the end of the week, it would be perfect! ).

I'll wait for your news about the server... again, it's very important to me. Thank you everyone, I hope you enjoy Messenger Plus! 2.00 .

Patchou.

Just a small comment... moderators can't see e-mail address', just admins on the admin cp.

Someone give me a list of user IDs or usernames of the bug reporters, and I'll get the addresses from the DB. Note that it's possible to lie about your address, as the board isn't set to verify them.

quote:

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40,000 people every minute

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Ouch... that's a lot...

Well.... The server the forums are on you could hold both of us if we payed to upgrade the ram and you wanted to help pay for the server, Just PM me for more information.

That sounds like a good solution, but are you SURE it will handle THAT many connections?

Anyway, if it would get to much you could always temponary shutdown the Plus! forum temponary, just as long as needed for people to upgrade.... in 2 or 3 days the heaviest load will be gone i think.


Wj, what are the specs of this server right now? (CPU/memory/HD/bandwith/datalimit)... just curious.
And how many more RAM do you need / how expensive?


The Plus! site being hosted on this site will be nice, it's been prety stable last couple of months

BTW, Patchou, what are your plans a updating.... no auto-update at all anymore? It took you so much work to create it Whatever you do, i don't think you should get rid of it completely...
Maybe wj's server can keep auto-update alive forever? or some other offer...? Maybe sponsered hosting??? I think there will be some hosting provider intrested in sponsering auto-update... if you just give the user a single webpage after each update of Plus! with a nice advertisment for the hosting company.
All the hosting company needs todo is host auto-update on a stable machine for a low price, and they'll get 100 of thuosands views each time a user installs/updates Plus!



And if you're not continuing auto-update at all, will there be something else? I was thinking of a mailinglist... that shouldn't be that hard to handle risght?

Hmm... what happened to SonicBoom's post that said the server would never be able to handle the load?

It's a pretty old machine... I doubt it would do the job...

Maybe once the number of auto-update hits goes down, it can be safely re-enabled? You could change the 5 minute interval too, to avoid this problem in the future...

Reading WDZ's reply.... hmmmmm..... that 5 minute interval is the main problem? I see....


Yeah, that definitly needs to be fixed.... why not change it to something like: If it can't connect to the server: Let it retry in an randomly choosen amount of X minutes. The value of X should then be randomly choosen between somthing like 180 and 720 minutes.

If you do it something like that, then all the users won't be checking for an update at the SAME time.

I guess the same think should be done for the FIRST check after each install/updrade... don't let EVERYONE check after exactly 7 days, but let it differ for everybody... choose a random date from 7 up to 10 days for the FIRST check after each install/upgrade.
The second and all other checks CAN be done for everybody in exactly seven days after the check that was before that one.


All this to avoid too many people accesing you system at the same moment on your server.



But, whatever you do, you need a new update to get it working first.... i guess you could make that update and then let me and other people announce it on the big MSN sites first and then wait a week BEFORE making auto-update alive, that should make much diffrence.
After all... *none* of the people having installed MP2 now got it trough auto-update or patchou.com... THEY ALL got it from the big msn related sites and other news sites... so lets try to distribute the update the exact same way, then after a week or so kick in the auto-update


* Menthix realy hopes auto-update stays part of Plus!

Remove the auto-update? NO!!!!!!! YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME!!!!!!! WHAT ABOUT US?!?!?!?
Uhmhm.... Yeah. Anyway. I think resetting it to check for updates at one-week intervals will fix it all (5 minutes, what were you thinking?!?). Instead of having each MP2 user connect to your server 2016 times a week, they'll connect only once. So if you have 200,000 users (), that's 200,000 connections a week instead of 403,200,000!! Now the only problem is, what happens when there actually IS an update?

BTW, making the above calculation in seconds, it turns out 666 users connecting each second! That's with the 5-seconds intervals that is.... and 1 connection every 3 seconds with one-week intervals (wow that's still a lot!!).

BTW2, Jae, people wanna know if you still need more translators....

ANYCOW!! Happy birthday Patchou! and get well soon! and stuff!

Okie, hope I didn't forget anything.... (It's bad to post without saying much ya know, it's considered spamming and stuff...)

Okie bye.

The update check interval isn't 5 minutes in normal situations... only when MP can't connect. When it can connect, I think it checks every 2 days.

umm maybe, you can somehow put the update feature on sourceforge but it would just require some editing of the update code... i think