Reworking some Database data / Site Performance may be slow

Site performance, it's possible you may see slow downs or it might take a minute for your comments to post for the next couple days.

I'm rebuilding/denormalizing the table that tracks each gamertag for each day(which has more rows that blog since we don't write blogs for people that don't play for 30+ days). This table is up to 334 million rows and it takes up 60GB.

I hope to get the size down to under 20GB and better than that, it will be organized/indexed better. Mostly, this will improve results when you look at your gamerscore chart. I'm planning a secondary update to work on all of our charts, there's a lot of new stuff out now that will make these charts run a lot smoother. 

This may go on for 3 or 4 days, I'll keep you posted. It's taking 3 minutes a day and I'm scared to run this overnight. Good news is 500 days down(24 million rows), only 2100 days and 310 million rows to go. 

Top 21 Most Popular for April 2013

"New" guy at the top! How about that.

So, bad sign when last post was last months, let me see if I can make something happen. I'd like to run some blog content related to speculation on what will be in the next xbox, so any ideas, email me through the forums, post on my blog, even comment here(I do have comments turned on for moderation since we usually get spam on the main blog here.)



1. Streak Leader *
2. Stallion83 *
3. the dren *
4. smrnov *
5. pTartTX *
6. senyek *
7. Boerke *
8. LAFTA *
9. ohjay08 *
10. futiles *
11. Buckswana *
12. N1GHTMAREB4XMAS *
13. Elem3ntal80 *
14. Fshguy *
15. dacoto *
16. SmokenRocket *
17. Kaens *
18. Hotdogmcgee *
19. lady death 13 *
20. FragEmAndSmile *
21, LausDomini *

Top 21 Most Popular for March 2013

No joke, these people got a lot of clicks in March. Who is that #1 tag? No accident that half the people here are the cool crowd that have been to AchievementFest.

1. D3ath 4pon u *
2. Stallion83 *
3. the dren *
4. Streak Leader *
5. smrnov *
6. ohjay08 *
7. Buckswana *
8. Boerke *
9. Ry Fryy *
10. dacoto *
11. CKinAL *
12. pTartTX *
13. Ichya Paradise *
14. Fshguy *
15. QuiCkz Ninja *
16. SparkyMP *
17. deadinside247 *
18. Hotdogmcgee *
19. futiles *
20. Darkest Lion *
21. Elem3ntal80 *

Glorious day for Polling Rewrite

Today is the day that I cut over the Polling rewrite. So if you were paying very close attention, at around 6:45am Eastern, the Blogs starting coming out. Now we can return to the old days where most of you can wake up in the morning and check your blog entries. This means that Challenges are updated earlier now too, more waiting around for the official update. Another positive is that all of the daily jobs won't be lapping the day, game stat updates and leaderboards will be around late afternoon.

No more waiting until noon or later when MS messes up data that we get(The old process would add another 4 hours on these bad days).

With any code update, please report in the forums or on my blog or support@360voice.com if you experience issues.

Immediate improvements will be better data capture, no more missing games and updates to games which would happen to people that play near the cutoff sometimes. Updates to offline play will work better and those games will be captured.

People playing near the cutoff may still experience issues with streaks as they do now. I feel my processing  is better than the old process, but with how MS caches game data, there's no fool proof procedure. I have put logic in to handle it so people won't lose streaks, but that requires rewriting the blog process to take advantage of this.

Also coded in is better privacy ON detection, better handling of syncing up data after coming off privacy. It  needs more coding, but I would like to notify people when they turn on privacy, it happens enough that people don't realize that they've impacted their blogs by doing this. In line with this is detecting when people change their gamertag, working towards handling this and notifying users that they we stopped seeing them, did they change their tag(MS provides no way for us to find  you once the tag is changed). We need a better way for people to handle changing their tag without support getting in the way as well.

Upcoming, I will start working on the Blog process rewrite(it's taking 8-12 hours every day, it should be more like 2 or less). There is a thread in the forums for putting in suggestions for new phrases, we need new content for the blogs. I will be making it easier for us to update and add new phrases.

Top 21 Most Popular for February 2013

Short month, but got a friendly reminder to post this, so here goes:

1. Stallion83 *

2. D3ath 4pon u *

3. the dren *

4. smrnov *

5. Streak Leader *

6. QuiCkz Ninja *

7. Buckswana *

8. Boerke *

9. deadinside247 *

10. pTartTX *

11. dacoto *

12. Fshguy *

13. HorrorPastry *

14. SILVERsifDURFER *

15. Darkest Lion *

16. JB330 *

17. MysticWeirdo *

18. futiles *

19. SparkyMP *

20. Kaens *

21. CKinAL *

Support Issues the past month

Apologies to those that have not received support over the past month or so. We've corrected issue with the support email. support@360voice.com should be working correctly now which means you should get a response with a ticket number.

Thanks to MightyMango and Futiles for helping clear up the back log. If you still have an issue, please email again or drop a message in the support forum.

Sorry again for the delays. If you do not receive support after 3 or 4 days, please let me know.

Fish

Top 21 Most Popular for January 2013

January is gone. Now for a really short month since I delayed getting this done.

1. Stallion83 *
2. the dren *
3. smrnov *
4. Streak Leader *
5. pTartTX *
6. Boerke *
7. TXMOOK *
8. QuiCkz Ninja *
9. futiles *
10. dacoto *
11. Buckswana *
12. Darkest Lion *
13. Fshguy *
14. FragEmAndSmile *
15. Mightymango *
16. SparkyMP *
17. Elem3ntal80 *
18. Hotdogmcgee *
19. Fragilesound *
20. CKinAL *
21. Kaens *