Status of Chat

DoxysTurtle · Post by **DoxysTurtle** » Thu Jul 26, 2012 3:15 pm

Fixed Memory Allocation. Finally figured out where our openfire was reading in the parameter in /etc/default/openfire instead of /usr/share/openfire/bin/openfire (no that anyone cares where the issue is). Now with twice as much memory the crashing issue we've seen should disappear.

This week I'm also moving us to a better and more efficient database schema which should not only decrease the memory needs, but allow the chat server to run more smoothly. Hope to get this done in the next couple days (though it's something on the backend no one will notice).

Turtle

DoxysTurtle · Post by **DoxysTurtle** » Sun Jul 29, 2012 7:44 am

Made an edit to the front page regarding XMPP client policy. We're going to temporarily restrict the permitted clients to iChat, Spark, Trillian and Candy (out Milovana offering). We're hoping to see the effect this has on server load and the random crashes we've had of late. Empathy (the chat client built into Ubuntu - which I was using at points) has a known XMPP bug which was supposed to be patched. It may be that when a user disconnects it floods the server with bad XMPP stanzas, causing the crash. We will slowly be adding back other XMPP clients if this is successful in stopping out crash issue.

There will be an announcement about this shortly (when I get ahold of someone who can make/post one for me).

DoxysTurtle · Post by **DoxysTurtle** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 4:04 pm

We aren't currently sure why our chat server went from so so stable to as incredibly unstable as it is. I know this is frustrating, as the argument can be made that we're no better off now than we were with flashchat. Please know that I am putting some serious time into making changes and figuring this out this week, so we can go back to being stable.

Please bare with us for a bit, I promise it will get fixed.

Post by **Banquo** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 4:19 pm

DoxysTurtle wrote:We aren't currently sure why our chat server went from so so stable to as incredibly unstable as it is. I know this is frustrating, as the argument can be made that we're no better off now than we were with flashchat. Please know that I am putting some serious time into making changes and figuring this out this week, so we can go back to being stable.

Please bare with us for a bit, I promise it will get fixed.

Please don't take any of this as personal Turtle, the work you are doing is greatly appreciated, I just don't want that work to be in vein. I understand flashchat was a pain to reboot as you explained to me earlier, but surely something was causing it to go down in the first place? And the amount of man hours you are putting into this candychat just seems disproportionate to the supposed gains. We are clearly a long way off getting anything near as good as flashchat was when it was at it's best. That is likely going to equal hundreds of hours of coding for you. Seems a lot of effort for something that is no better (if not worse) than what we had.

Banquo

les · Post by **les** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 4:32 pm

Trillian is not connecting either.

Silly question what did you do to stop those other engines connect,
Can you step back to Friday's setup?

DoxysTurtle · Post by **DoxysTurtle** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 5:10 pm

les wrote:
Trillian is not connecting either.

Silly question what did you do to stop those other engines connect,
Can you step back to Friday's setup?

Les I just tested and can connect with Trillian, along with a couple others being able to. How it works is that when an XMPP client connect to the server, it sends it's application name, basically we filter those and any not on the approved list get blocked.

I can revert it to Friday's settings for that, though that is unrelated to our current stability issues, that started occuring without having any settings changes.

DoxysTurtle · Post by **DoxysTurtle** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 5:17 pm

Banquo wrote:
DoxysTurtle wrote:We aren't currently sure why our chat server went from so so stable to as incredibly unstable as it is. I know this is frustrating, as the argument can be made that we're no better off now than we were with flashchat. Please know that I am putting some serious time into making changes and figuring this out this week, so we can go back to being stable.

Please bare with us for a bit, I promise it will get fixed.
Please don't take any of this as personal Turtle, the work you are doing is greatly appreciated, I just don't want that work to be in vein. I understand flashchat was a pain to reboot as you explained to me earlier, but surely something was causing it to go down in the first place? And the amount of man hours you are putting into this candychat just seems disproportionate to the supposed gains. We are clearly a long way off getting anything near as good as flashchat was when it was at it's best. That is likely going to equal hundreds of hours of coding for you. Seems a lot of effort for something that is no better (if not worse) than what we had.

Banquo

@Banquo yes something was, though time was spent, and it wasn't able to figure out why, with a ton of time spent there.

In terms of supposed gains, when (not if) we manage to get back to being stable, the supposed gains will be there. I respectfully disagree about near as good as flashchat, but that's an argument that's neither here nor there. I know that you, and others miss features from flashchat and will argue that this system isn't nearly as good, but I can't agree with the calling it worse.

Post by **Banquo** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 5:39 pm

DoxysTurtle wrote:
Banquo wrote:
DoxysTurtle wrote:We aren't currently sure why our chat server went from so so stable to as incredibly unstable as it is. I know this is frustrating, as the argument can be made that we're no better off now than we were with flashchat. Please know that I am putting some serious time into making changes and figuring this out this week, so we can go back to being stable.

Please bare with us for a bit, I promise it will get fixed.
Please don't take any of this as personal Turtle, the work you are doing is greatly appreciated, I just don't want that work to be in vein. I understand flashchat was a pain to reboot as you explained to me earlier, but surely something was causing it to go down in the first place? And the amount of man hours you are putting into this candychat just seems disproportionate to the supposed gains. We are clearly a long way off getting anything near as good as flashchat was when it was at it's best. That is likely going to equal hundreds of hours of coding for you. Seems a lot of effort for something that is no better (if not worse) than what we had.

Banquo

@Banquo yes something was, though time was spent, and it wasn't able to figure out why, with a ton of time spent there.

In terms of supposed gains, when (not if) we manage to get back to being stable, the supposed gains will be there. I respectfully disagree about near as good as flashchat, but that's an argument that's neither here nor there. I know that you, and others miss features from flashchat and will argue that this system isn't nearly as good, but I can't agree with the calling it worse.

I just don't see how it is better. It doesn't work half the time and has zero features. When you get it more stable, you will still need to spend hours upon hours coding up features. Just seems illogical. But I suppose there is no point harking back to the halcyon days of flashchat, it's dead now. Good luck getting this one stabilised. And I hope to be able to use it again soon.

les · Post by **les** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 6:26 pm

Trillian back up for me too.

Post by **Banquo** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 6:36 pm

les wrote:
Trillian back up for me too.

It won't even find the Milo rooms on mine *shrugs*

sexylama · Post by **sexylama** » Thu Aug 02, 2012 1:42 am

I'd like to be able to connect using mIRC. If others would like that as well, please speak up. He said if others like the idea, he'd work on it. :) Because he's awesome!

DoxysTurtle · Post by **DoxysTurtle** » Fri Aug 10, 2012 1:05 am

We've officially had a major crash this morning... I'm not able to tell for sure whether the Database corrupting caused all of our recent downtime or not... It definitely caused this mornings.

We've moved to using an external database, so we can more easily track problems, and restore it if an issue pops up. Sorry for the unexpected downtime and thanks for bearing with us. Hopefully the recent problems will be gone from this move.

If you have any new problem connecting, please let me know here or via Forum PM.

Post by **Banquo** » Wed Sep 12, 2012 12:16 pm

So are there any updates on chat? It doesn't seem to have changed much since it was implemented.

Oda · Post by **Oda** » Fri Sep 21, 2012 8:49 pm

Yes.. would be nice to see at least a slow progress, instead of nothing.

DoxysTurtle · Post by **DoxysTurtle** » Fri Sep 21, 2012 8:56 pm

Unfortunately I've been swamped and busy, so there's been little to no progress on my end. The only thing I can say along progress lines, is we figured out the hiccup we had for a month or so a while ago, and chat has run for over a month without any downtime, and has proven to be quite stable.

As for new features and progress on that end, you're right it's been slow to non-existant. I'm sure some of it will come in time, but I'm not making any promises, as between two jobs and school, I get too busy at points to remotely want to write another line of code or debug things when I finish.

I'm sure if someone else with the coding skills would like to volunteer to help, Seraph0x wouldn't object, and it's no secret the software platforms we're using as a base. Openfire ( http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/ ) as our XMPP server and a frontend of Candy Chat ( http://candy-chat.github.com/candy/ ) That said, when I have spare time, I do plan to work on new features, there just hasn't been enough of it to make any progress worth talking about here.

Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat

Re: Status of Chat