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Stockfighter is live

stockfighter.io

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Re: Stockfighter is live

#82
post #78
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know using Rails isn't as popular here as it once was, but in my experience, if you cache correctly (like you should), it's trivial to scale.

Modestly less trivial if you happen to put your chat server on the box with Rails because Rails is certainly not going to fall over and your chat server attempts to open several thousand websockets on a box with a not-too-generous number of open file descriptors, it appears.

"Make sure you've turned up the file descriptors" is the single-process socket server equivalent of "Turn off HTTP KeepAlive" for Apache sites. :)

(Yeah, I've had outage because of this too.)

Re: Stockfighter is live

#84
post #28

Hey guys -- the most resource-intensive part of the infrastructure (the game master boxes) is currently overwhelmed by your enthusiasm. We're spinning up more boxes for you, but it will take a few minutes.

I hope you get this fixed soon. It can be quite stressful having your exposure period potentially damaged because your software or infrastructure can't handle the sudden influx. Stick to deep breathes and think it through :)

I'm pretty calm at the moment, particularly now that the servers seem to be cooling down a bit.

Startup culture says Launch Days Are Really Important. This is not our first rodeo. We know 0.01% of the people who are going to play this game are even aware it exists at the moment. We're pleased as punch that y'all are playing and some of you are progressing in it, but long-term, a few teething problems on launch day is a no-op.

Re: Stockfighter is live

#85
post #73

This is part of the game. To beat this level you sweet talk the founders into letting you help them fix their scalability problems. If you get the site running in 3 hours, you get a bonus score of ∞.

∞ score doesn't sound bad. I should start up an LLC and give away 99% of my score to that LLC, for charity purposes.

Re: Stockfighter is live

#87
post #29
post #4

Well, sort of. Erin and I are scrambling on last-minute emulator/compiler bugs, but Patrick is letting people play with his trading exchange levels.

Raah, that was the part I was looking for, I wanted to use it to learn a bit about assembly and code generation - I couldn't care less about HFT (sorry Patrick). Good luck!

Things are looking good, but we're decorating the family Christmas tree tonight, and so I took a break about 30 minutes ago. My current guess is that our part will be up tomorrow early.

Just for anyone interested:

We're pushing a "trainer" tomorrow, which is essentially "one level" of the CTF, so that people who have never looked at low-level embedded systems code can get the hang of it, and so we can, you know, not blow up when the actual CTF runs.

The trainer can do some things that the real CTF UI won't be able to do (because they would make levels too easy to clear), so I'm just fine with that. It's fun in a different way from the CTF.

The full CTF we'll post in a week or two. Ironically: it was pruning all the real CTF levels out that screwed me this week. You go into thinking "all we're doing is removing functionality, this will be easy", and by the end of the week you're setting your computer on fire.

Re: Stockfighter is live

#88
post #82
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modestly less trivial if you happen to put your chat server on the box with Rails because Rails is certainly not going to fall over and your chat server attempts to open several thousand websockets on a box with a not-too-generous number of open file descriptors, it appears.

"Make sure you've turned up the file descriptors" is the single-process socket server equivalent of "Turn off HTTP KeepAlive" for Apache sites. :) (Yeah, I've had outage because of this too.)

Surely you meant "Turn on HTTP pipelining"? Or is there something wrong with Apache's pipelining implementation?

Re: Stockfighter is live

#90
post #28

Hey guys -- the most resource-intensive part of the infrastructure (the game master boxes) is currently overwhelmed by your enthusiasm. We're spinning up more boxes for you, but it will take a few minutes.

These are definitely good problems to have!

the kind of problems where i leave the site forever, and never trust the founders with anything ever again?

YEAH!

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