roncli.com blog
The blog of roncli
roncli.com blog
roncli.com
blog
Profile
roncli
Houston, Texas, United States
Labels
Coding
CTG Music
Editorials
Games
Miscellaneous
Music
Servers
Silliness
Software
Sports
Trax in Space Beta
Weather
Recent Posts
WTF did Revival Productions just do?
A Tale of Two Communities
The Final Stretch
A Two Tiered, Untiered OTL
Secretly, you wish you could've done what I did
What have I done since roncli.com v2?
It's Done. It's Finally Done.
The Big Picture is Starting to Wear on Me
A Low Bang to Buck Ratio
win-acme
Archives
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
June 2008
July 2008
September 2008
December 2008
February 2009
July 2009
August 2009
September 2009
October 2009
November 2009
February 2010
March 2010
April 2010
June 2010
July 2010
August 2010
September 2010
October 2010
November 2010
December 2010
March 2011
June 2011
July 2011
August 2011
September 2011
October 2011
December 2011
January 2012
February 2012
April 2012
July 2012
November 2012
July 2013
April 2014
July 2014
August 2014
November 2014
December 2014
March 2015
April 2015
May 2015
June 2015
July 2015
September 2015
January 2016
February 2016
May 2016
July 2016
November 2016
March 2017
January 2018
May 2018
June 2018
January 2019
January 2021
February 2021
March 2021
August 2021
October 2021
December 2021
August 2022
November 2022
October 2023
February 2024
April 2024
Current Posts
Sunday, August 29, 2021
A Low Bang to Buck Ratio
Posted: 2:08:00 AM 0 comments
The story behind Six Gaming is long, complex, and probably can't be covered in a single post. If I were to sum up what Six Gaming is today, the answer would be "probably should be dead, but stubbornly isn't". I knew this going into redesigning the Six Gaming website, yet I did it anyway. Why?

There's a number of personal reasons involved. My outside hope that some day everyone stops being super busy with life and commits to a podcast again, which is what the original community was built around after our WoW guild died. The only reason I decided to stop streaming it is because no one could commit to the schedule except for me. The website also has a Discord and Twitch bot that promotes streamers, hosting them on our Twitch page, which would be a great tool if the community was still active. However, it's not active, so the main reason I used to justify upgrading Six Gaming? Knowledge building.

Six Gaming is the first website that I've built that runs with a MongoDB back end. It's the second site I've built that uses Docker containers. It's also the second site I've built on my current generation of node.js website architecture, but the first time I've done it within Docker. The website uses Discord.js, Express, FullCalendar, the node.js wrapper for IGDB, the node.js wrapper for MongoDB, and the Twitch.js library that is being rebranded as the ridiculously-named Twurple. However, when I talk about my website architecture, I don't mean the libraries I'm using, but rather the way the website is put together.

I drew some inspiration from the now-defunct Rendr library. It was a node.js library that worked with Backbone.js to let you code a web site just once to render web pages on both the client and server side, making it easy to create single page applications. I was turned on to this library while working for the startup Sift back in 2013, and ultimately used it for my personal site roncli.com. Of course, as soon as I released that site, Rendr stopped getting updated, so I stopped using Rendr and started rolling my own.

The first website I used this new architecture with was the Overload Teams League. I didn't go too far with it, only making it so that there are views that can be rendered either client or server side. I didn't go as far as making it a single page application, that wouldn't come until version 2.0 of roncli.com. The back end architecture is your run of the mill MVC application, nothing too exciting going on. What made everything tick, however, was a custom-built router that I would eventually release to NPM called Hot Router. It's called that, because it has an option that lets you hot-swap controller files while the site is live while the application is running. That was super useful for debugging the first few sites created with it, but the hot swapping has become less useful now that I've gotten better at using Docker.

All of the above is setup for one of the more amusing issues I encountered while working on Six Gaming's website, and there were plenty. Being only my second Docker project, I won't talk about what I can only describe as "newbie mistakes". However, the biggest thing I found was what I term the memory leak from hell.

I discovered it when I was working on the Hot Router project. The gist of the problem is that for weeks after the launch of six.gg, I had a very slow memory leak that would break down the server after about a week. It drove me insane that I couldn't find it. The lengths I went to in order to find the leak were insane. First, I wrote my own calls to the docker.sock API, logging the metrics to Application Insights. That alone instantly doubled the cost of the server while I had the metrics active. The price you pay.

This led me to learn the memory leak was happening in the node.js Docker container. In order to find the memory leak, I had to connect the node.js instance inside Docker to Google Chrome's dev tools. Once I did that, I spent hours pouring over memory logs, slowly narrowing the problem to my shiny new router. Did making the router a module cause the memory leak? Did I screw something up porting the code over from being inline in the project to its own module?

No, the memory leak was there all along. I tried comparing Date objects to see if they were different. While you can compare to see if they are greater than or less than each other, trying to compare that they are equal or not equal actually doesn't work. This was causing Hot Router to always treat the controllers as if they were just hot swapped. It would delete the cache of the controller and re-require it. As it turns out, the act of deleting the cache and re-requiring it caused the memory leak. That, combined with the date comparison bug, resulted in a slow memory leak.

As I was fixing that bug, it dawned on me. I run the Overload Game Tracker, and that site had been suffering from a memory leak for over a year. It runs an early version of the routing code that Hot Router uses. Turns out I solved a very old memory leak by finding the leak in an entirely different application.

Anyway, Six Gaming's website has been humming along for a while. It was a lot of effort for not a lot of reward. However, this project taught me a ton about Docker, MongoDB, and more. And everything I learned from this is going into my most ambitious project yet... my own website! More on that in a future post.

Labels: , , , ,

win-acme
Posted: 2:05:00 AM 0 comments
Here's a great piece of free software for IIS administrators who want to easily manage their SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt.

win-acme is a self-guided command line utility that allows you to quickly and easily take an IIS website and get an SSL certificate on it. After struggling with utilities like ACMESharpCore, ZeroSSL's Crypt-LE, and Posh-ACME, I realized that all of these tools, while powerful, didn't have any ease of use whatsoever. When I first looked at the text interface for win-acme, I didn't think it was going to be as easy as selecting options from a menu.

It's as easy as selecting optinos from a menu.

Within 5 minutes, I had 7 websites with shiny new SSL certs, and I had gotten them scheduled them for a regular renewal. I didn't have to do any configuration or any PowerShell scripting, it just worked. Give it a try if you're running websites on IIS!

Labels: , , , ,