Comments on: WoW.com Crushed PUG Checker

By: paralax

paralax — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:10:09 +0000

Did you find out the rate limits on wowarmory.com? If so, I’d be very interested.

If I keep only 1 concurrent connection it is working fine, but I haven’t tried pushing it yet.

Please email me if you have any more info.

By: Nance

Nance — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:38:45 +0000

The traffic has slowed down enough now that I think things are starting to get under control. The site has been running fine (knock on wood) since midnight on the 1st.

By: Jederus

Jederus — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:55:36 +0000

Sorry to hear about the crash. It was a fantastic resource, hope you can get it working again soon.

By: Rahl

Rahl — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:45:34 +0000

There is a blogg that mines the armory dor data all the time and he had similar problems to you but he had a workaround.

Hoe this helps

http://flyv.typepad.com/warcraft/

By: David

David — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:25:28 +0000

How about you need a user to do a look-up?

Just a simple login with some valid-mail check thingy and then give the user a chance to do 5-10 checks each day. That could bring down the traffic pretty much, I guess? And only people who really needs it would use it instead of all the random lookups.

Anyways just a simple suggestion =)

By: Alex Ziebart

Alex Ziebart — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:57:03 +0000

Sorry we brought your site down. :\ We tend to have that effect. I hope you get things back up and running soon!

By: Nance

Nance — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:50:32 +0000

I’m not sure a lot of people are understanding the problem here. It’s not that I can’t cache the data (which I am now doing). It’s that the sheer volume of new visitors looking up their characters, which requires a call to the Armory at least once, causes the site to hit the data limit almost immediately.

The site was back up tonight for 3 minutes and went down after 200 people at midnight on a Monday rushed the site looking up their own characters.

The only way to stop this with the traffic at this kind of level is to cache the entire Armory’s data on my own server. I’m not interested in that solution right now.

By: else

else — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:16:53 +0000

memcached.

When you pull from the armory, pop it into memcached. When you look up a character, check the memcache first and only if it’s not cached go to armory. Probably take 5 mins to add this support.

By: AllianceGirl (Boombaloo)

AllianceGirl (Boombaloo) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:38:16 +0000

I’m sorry to hear that the site broke. I loved your site and used it when organizing PUG runs on my server (some of my guildmates also used it when they were in charge of pugging 25 mans). I’m glad it was featured, though – because you did such a great job on it. It’s nice for you to get some recognition for your hard work…just sucks that it will require a lot more work on your part to keep it going. :/

By: Arabbear

Arabbear — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:28:07 +0000

You might trying a combination of what’s suggest and a queue.

Similar to be.imba. when a person makes a request they sit in a queue, you can set how long it is between each request to wowarmory. ie a request every 5 seconds. once you have it, you can cache it for a period of time.

By: Nance

Nance — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:10:41 +0000

I’m working on that right now, Xillian. The only problem with this method is that it doesn’t solve the downtime caused by the initial rush of traffic. Hopefully I’ll have something working and running before the ban on my IP is lifted by the Armory.

By: Xillian

Xillian — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:34:56 +0000

Why not just cache on the fly? It’s not going to be perfect but all you need to do is keep your xml files you pull from the armory in a folder. Then when a request is made, check the date of the file and if its older than the expiration time you want to use, poll the armory and re-download it.

If you can find out the rate limit from Blizzard (I haven’t been able to find anything on this) write your own personal counter to make sure you stay under 90%.

If you’re busy and wouldn’t mind help (again provided its in php) I’d love to lend a hand. I’m sure you can pull my email, drop me a line and I’d love to help.

By: Rilnac

Rilnac — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:00:33 +0000

What if you created a version of the site that did the armory query using the end users connection. This way the armory queries would not be coming from your server ip. Not sure what the technical limitations are in setting up something like that, perhaps it would even requires a stand alone app on the user end.