A look at the rest of the year and reviewing the site’s performance.
Hey all, MrProg here for another update on the state of the site and where the latest focus has been. Let’s get right into it!
🔥Site Performance
First I want to address the elephant in the room being the site’s recent performance. The frequent down times, long page loading, and repeated crashes have all been very frustrating as both a dev and a user. So today I want to offer transparency into how I’ve been addressing this issue by giving a look into some of the many shadow updates I’ve made to help keep site under control.
1. Doubled server capacity
I usually try to avoid just throwing more resources at a performance problem because I feel like it can promote badly optimized code and doesn’t solve the root of the issue. I also still struggle to believe how much the site has grown over the past few years so eventually you really do just need more resources. Now the site is able to spin-up twice as many instances when traffic peaks, ideally making it less noticeable by having enough hosts to serve every request.
2. Blocked abusing IPs
Lately a number of companies have been targeting Backloggd in mass by sending an absurd amount of requests to the site. Sometimes in a given hour there were more requests for a single IP than double of all the site’s normal traffic. I’ve taken measures and built more configurable ways to block these IPs, stopping them from eating up all the resources. It’ll be a game of whack-a-mole as changing an IP is easy enough to do, but I’m hoping the systems now in place will help respond to these situations quicker.
3. Cached homepage sections
The homepage continues to be one of the heaviest pages on the site, which isn’t great as an entry point for many users (including myself). So while I continue to find ways to optimize how data on the homepage is fetched, I’ve also started caching some sections to help cut down on having to make the same request multiple times for data that isn’t really going to change. For instance, the ‘Popular with friends’ section is pretty heavy as it has to fetch all logs across all friends from the past few months and given the data spans days, it’s not likely to change very often. So now those games will stay cached for hours at a time vs trying to fetch it fresh every time. This has already seen big improvements and I’m looking for more ways to help cutdown on that initial load time without compromising the information offered.
4. Rewrote how game ratings are updated
Anything to do with a large amount of logs is going to take time to fetch, that includes aggregating all ratings across everyone’s logs for a game. This has been cached for a while now but still saw pretty harsh load times whenever that cache expired and the ratings had to be fetched again. So for the past few months these ratings have been updating asynchronously by occasionally updating in the background whenever a log’s rating has been edited. This was going well until the amount of games needing to be updated piled up, it started draining all resources trying to keep up. Turns out the code I wrote to update the logs was really inefficient and after reexamining that, it has been back to updating in the background without compromising the rest of the site.
All of this is to say that I’m continuously working on improving site performance as it’s an always evolving process. One day a system you build will work fine, the next it will buckle under just an extra hundred requests. So I really appreciate the patience you’ve been giving me while I catch up!
💖The 1.13 Update
The next feature update for Backloggd has been cooking and is almost ready for release! You’re going to really LIKE what’s in store, it may having you GUESSING but won’t have to wait much longer to find out. Stay tuned for the next blog post which will go into detail on everything the update has to offer. Likely dropping later this month!
🏆GOTY 2024
Get ready for Backloggd’s annual Game of the Year event, the community driven poll to determine Backloggd’s GOTY!
This year the event will be starting on December 1st, 2024 and running into the new year. The decision to shift the event by half a month is to be able to include all 2024 games in the eligible choices, giving more time to play those late December releases by continuing the event into January.
Want to brush up on how last year’s event went? Check out the results : https://www.backloggd.com/goty/2023/results/
That’s all to share for now, thanks for checking out the latest on Backloggd! I promise it won’t be months before the next one. In similar news, I’m also working on a plan to get updates out quicker. Hopefully I’ll have more to share on that in the new year…
See you next time!
MrProg
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