Nearly four years ago, on September 16, 2004, CSFBL – the Computer Simulated Fantasy Baseball League (the greatest web-based multiplayer baseball simulation ever made, in my opinion, despite the long name) was migrated to what was (at the time) a hot new server. Performance was spectacular, and things stayed rather well… for a while…
Fast forward to 2008. CSFBL was crumbling under its own weight — and popularity. A game that was originally designed to handle a few hundred users now had thousands. More users meant more teams; more teams meant more games simulated; more games simulated meant more server utilization… The 3+ year old server, once handling the every-three-hour simulation in an hour and a half, took four or more hours to get it done. People were frustrated; I was frustrated. Something had to change.
A little over a month ago, I rented a new dedicated server from SoftLayer. After installing, testing, and re-testing, CSFBL worked its way over to its new home last night. So far things are zipping along quite nicely, and we’ll see how performance really is at noon today when we run the first sim on the new hardware. I don’t expect miracles (the game still needs major architectural changes), but I do expect notable improvements to performance and reliability.
A quick plug follows…
Backing up, copying, and restoring 150GB worth of SQL data wouldn’t have been as easy without SQLsafe, a SQL backup/compression product by Idera. What’s most incredible is that I am using the free version, SQLsafe Freeware Edition, which does the job perfectly at a price I can really afford.
Normally using free software like this in commercial environments is a no-no — so I spoke with a sales rep at Idera to make sure I wasn’t violating any licensing. Incredibly, I wasn’t. Needless to say, I highly recommend SQLsafe, and will certainly consider using other Idera products in the future (even the ones that aren’t free).
Anyway, let’s all welcome CSFBL to its new home — which also happens to be the home for AOChub, another web site I recently launched, but more on that in another blog post…
harborpirate says:
Hopefully this will be the first step in ushering in a new era for CSFBL.