Sunday, May 17, 2015

The Battle Loader and the Frequency of Updates

The Battle Loader

Clan Tools has a number of tasks that run on an "out of band" scheduler; the most outwardly noticeable of these tasks is battle loading and payout calculations.

This scheduler stops working from time to time, seemingly at random. I had thought it was a memory issue and thus thought it was most likely to fail during the daily maintenance tasks which tend to eat up a lot of memory, so I based my (manual) monitoring around that assumption. Yesterday has shown my existing approach is insufficient.

I have created a semi-automated way to monitor the scheduler, and to detect when it failed. This should, at the very least, decrease the downtime when it does fail in addition to giving me a better picture of what is failing.

The Frequency of Updates

About two weeks ago I started a MSCS program which--in contrast to the past few months before where I effectively had nothing I needed to do, or even the a BSCS program I was in--has left me with a lot less time to spend working on Clan Tools. This is especially true of long chunks of time which are ideal when working on the more complex features.

To be clear, I have no intention of stopping my work on maintaining and improving Clan Tools. I'm writing this simply to let everyone know what my situation is and why updates have been, and will continue to be, slower to come out relative to the changes they bring.

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