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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

Hi All. Server is getting absolutely pummelled right now. If you get stuck in a game, you can hit 'refresh' and it should come back. Thanks for playing!

Technicals: It is a medium EC2 running a single node process with socket.io. Database is an EC2 micro running rethinkdb.

--EDIT-- Replay functionality seems to be down entirely due to load. Games are still running though.

--EDIT2-- Replays are back up! Just need to wait a while. For those who are discouraged by the signup - I understand, but due to the nature of the game it is necessary to prevent cheating. Email is not required. Feel free to create a random string as a username and password if you want to give it a try.

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>For those who are discouraged by the signup - I understand, but due to the nature of the game it is necessary to prevent cheating.

Can you please elaborate on why you believe signup is necessary to prevent cheating?

Sure - because if you can spoof someone's username while they are playing, you can see their moves :)

Wouldn't a secure cookie be enough for this?

Yes good point - I might be able to make that work if I spent the time to perfect it, but I'm not a security guy so there was the off chance I might overlook something.

There were couple other good reasons for the signup given my initial target demographic of two people :). And you may have also noticed that everyone gets an Elo rating if you visit /spielers.html

As a side project I weighed the options and just chose to have signups rather than complicate the issue. They can be purely anonymous, and it makes it easier for me to manage. If it is really a stopping point for losing potential players I am willing to live with that.

On a side note - I'm very glad to see you are enjoying the game. You've played almost as many games as me in 1/100th the time!

>On a side note - I'm very glad to see you are enjoying the game. You've played almost as many games as me in 1/100th the time!

Yes I really like it! I hope you will be able to keep enough players around.

Any insight on what's killing your server? I've been recently looking into socket.io's issues with scaling.

Trying to figure that out now. DB seems spiffy, and express is logging requests just fine. Thats the trivial stuff - now I need to start getting my hands dirty.

EDIT - OK serious issues now. getting a range error on redis and the call stack is blowing out, recycling node every 15 seconds or so. Will let you know when its back up.

EDIT2 - Turned out to be an exception due to an invalid date string. Fixed!

Along the same lines, what are some of the metrics of your traffic that caused socket.io to choke (total connections, # concurrent, etc)?

or was it the other pieces in your stack that caused the bottleneck.

BTW, great idea.

Love it! And won my game :-)

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