City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Titan Network: Jan. 22 Maintenance (sort of...)

Arcanaville

By Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2012-01-22 09:00 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

Hey all, I've made a change in our DNS and our hosting setup that, in theory, should be completely transparent to everyone. I'm just posting because in reality, sometimes these things can cause issues ranging from minor blips to total site outages.

The skinny is that I'm testing out a CDN service, CloudFlare, to see if it can help to speed up access to the Titan Network sites and take some of the load off of our server for static resources (css pages, javascript pages, images, etc.). CloudFlare also has features to stop spam and hacker attacks, which is a Good Thing™. If it works well, a lot of the content you're current getting directly off of our server will be served up by their distributed network of servers instead. Our servers will have lighter load, your pages will load faster, win-win. If not, well, I can always turn it off.

If anyone notices any problems, please let me know. You can PM me here or hit me up on Skype (tonyv.paragonwiki).

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by TonyV View Post
You can [...] hit me up on Skype (tonyv.paragonwiki).
The quoted portion is of questionable reliability. (-:

 

Posted

To the Cloud!

Andy Belford
Community Manager
Paragon Studios

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Zwillinger View Post
To the Cloud!

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Posted

We had an issue with Sentinel not correctly processing updates. It boils down to CloudFlare munging the response. Accordingly, we've temporarily disabled it for the cit.cohtitan.com domain as well as the webservice domain that Sentinel uses to communicate back to Titan. It's still locked and loaded for the rest of the domains, though. Hopefully we'll get the munging issue cleared up before too long and be back up and running full throttle.

Edit: By "munge," I don't mean to misrepresent that it screwed something up. It optimizes web pages for transfer to cut down on bandwidth. In a web browser, this translation is transparent. In our case, though, the Sentinel application is expecting the data in a specific format that isn't compatible with optimized code. Thus, we're trying to figure out how to either get it to not optimize that particular bit of data or to get Sentinel to work with the additional format.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)

 

Posted

I seem to recall discussing CloudFlare with someone early last year. If memory serves, they started off as a fork of the Honeypot Project that was a security front end for web servers that tried to play optimization games with the pages to mask their own overhead so their security filtering would look transparent, and accidentally stumbled into ways to optimize their customers sites so that they ended up faster than before, even with the security filtering.

Because they optimize and compress web page content, unstructured web page communication can get easily mucked up, but its an extremely interesting technology. Perhaps a SOAP interface would work better through CF.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
If memory serves, they started off as a fork of the Honeypot Project that was a security front end for web servers that tried to play optimization games with the pages to mask their own overhead so their security filtering would look transparent, and accidentally stumbled into ways to optimize their customers sites so that they ended up faster than before, even with the security filtering.
This is true. One of the features of the service is that it uses the Honeypot project to check if machines hitting their customers' sites are part of a botnet or otherwise malicious (e.g. comment spam, e-mail harvesters, etc.). If so, the visitor will receive a CAPTCHA that must be successfully passed before serving up the site. In theory, this will help to keep traffic from hackers, spambots, and other unsavory elements out of our hair. In reality, of course, we still have to be vigilant. At some point, if this really works well, we might even be able to configure some of the web sites to only answer to CloudFlare's network and to otherwise be inaccessible to everyone else.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Because they optimize and compress web page content, unstructured web page communication can get easily mucked up, but its an extremely interesting technology. Perhaps a SOAP interface would work better through CF.
True. We're being bitten by Sentinel expecting a specific set of headers and CloudFlare serving up a different set. They're both legal, and browsers are robust enough to handle either one, but again, when we developed the interface that Sentinel uses, we assumed that we would have very fine-tuned control over the content that was served. With an intermediary like CloudFlare, that's not true. We've tossed around some ideas, and we should have a fix out shortly. In the meantime, like I said, Sentinel will continue to operate correctly because I've taken CIT out of CloudFlare's list of domains it handles, but of course, that means that everything else at CIT isn't optimized yet.

It's definitely interesting technology. I admit that I've had fun playing around with the configuration and dashboards.

Oh, one other noteworthy thing. In addition to the CloudFlare stuff, our resident guru Codewalker found a nasty little bug actually included in the server-side distribution we use that was periodically causing a back-end app to spawn off threads without end. It was causing our CPU utilization to spike uncontrollably every 30 minutes. He fixed it this morning, and everything's been pleasantly normal since.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)