Shoutbox

Ever heard of load balancing on multiple servers, once one server reaches its load the request is diverted to another one by the dns server until it reaches its load...etc (please remember we have 3 servers here (One zeonhost one)

Hey, no worries about traffic from here...

5 minutes is longer than I get on messenger when I run plus most of the time.

Sadly, I had to pull it off my machine.. reinstalling didn't help for long (oddly, it did work for a bit)...

But uh, basically, if you can't reach the server, don't try again till the next regularilly scheduled check, it's probably soon enough...

It retries every 5 minutes... in normal situation, it is supposed to check only once a week... the reason why I want to remove this feature, even if I worked hard on it, is that even by checking once a week, it will make several 100,000 connections every week... on a shared server such as the one that will host patchou.com, it is impossible and I don't want to buy a dedicated server anymore because of all the related problems. For the workload, remember that it would be a one time shot.... even if the server has difficulties the first day for example, still, a lot of people will be able to download the update file so the work load will decrease quickly. If Im in the mood, I'll release this update this evening in fact, that way it will prevent new users to add to the current count .

* Patchou just returned from the shower with an idea!
What I may do is the following: change this stupid 5 minute retry into something more intelligent and direct the auto-update connection to another domain which I'm going to register this evening. That was so simple.... the benefit of this is that as long as the domain does not directs to a server, the connection will just fail and nobody will be hurt. Then, when I want people to be updated, I only have to find someone kind enough to lend me some of its server bandwidth for some weeks! at that point, the 5minute bug will have been corrected so the auto-update file could for example be put on mess.be (that's a supposition, just an example) and the auto-update domain just setup to forward to mess.bet for one month, then just reset it untill the next update.

Dont know if I'm clear, I gotta go to work.... but anyway, I'll release a patched version soon soon soon because I need my server back.

Patchou

How about creating an MS Passport (lets call it msgplusupdate@hotmail.com, for example).  MsgPlus! itself could then send a "Message" in the background to this passport account in a particular format at random intervals (as already discussed) which effectively asks if an update exists.

You could then have some software running on a server which would receive all such requests as a message, and if an update existed, it could send a URL in a message back to the user's version of MsgPlus! which it would interpret as a message to itself (for security reasons it would need to check the username, not just the contents of the message) and then fetch the file and initiate an update.

The URLs that are sent back could be any one of a number held in a DB which are mirror sites hosting the update file.  Indeed you could even have more than one MS Passport set up in this way, and MsgPlus! would randomly pick one to ask, reducing the message count to any one individually.

Be kind to me, its my first post here ever!

Dave Mager,
London, UK.

That's a good idea too but it would require much more coding that I'm willing to put in the feature now... still, thank you, I'll keep it in mind

how mutch bandwith will it cost to only lend my server for a week or so?

keep in mind if it is to mutch i even can't internet because everything is connected to a singel ADSL line

or use loadbalancing with that "new domain" idee of your patchou...
i could lend you some space then..

if you find another 5 that are willing to lend some space / bandwith... and you should use loadbalancing with an "temporary domain" it would not cause alot of bandwith usage on any single server, and everybody will get the updates soon...

i hope i am clear enough ... if you have any questions just ask...
Sorry for my bad English

Exactly how big is the downloaded file for auto-update?

The file for the auto-update is the setup itself, it's 1Mb... but dont worry about it, downloading the setup file is, for now, not a problem... it's supporting the big number of hits to download the auto-update text file (which informs the software about the lastest version number) which is a problem.

Why not write a program for linux which can rotate the DNS record between several servers a day (DNS records should in theory only take the maximum of 90 seconds to update) all you have to do is collect the ip addresses of the servers you want to update off and load them up

i was thinking about DNS-Round-Robin  (it is in the name )

then you add to one DNS record more IP adresses
and DNS gives oud diferent IPs to diferent clients