WarcraftRealms.com

Changes what is considered current TOC
As such.. a new release has been pushed up to Curse.com
The only change at this time is to update the TOC from 50100 to 50200

Considering Blizzard restarted the server I had just gotten on after the patch was released.. they aren't stable yet.. and I haven't had a chance to check out if any other changes need to be made to CensusPlus.
(I don't have access to PTR)

From what I have been reading I don't think any other changes need to be made at this time.

The link for the new version (is/ will be)http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/census-plus

As of the time of this message the newest version hasn't made it through the Curse.com approval process.. but I expect it will soon.

Edit: about 20 minutes later.. it was approved at curseforge the addon input point.. but Curse itself hasn't been updated.

Edit2: about 8 minutes later. I was successful with a Census run.. so unless you tell me otherwise I believe the client is good to go... but nope. curse still doesn't have the update.

edit3: and some time less then 5 hours later Curse.com has the update available for downloading.

No errors for me here anyway And a nice little fact: it takes 1 hour 1 min to census 4010 people, that's the highest I've seen... no flippin' wonder it's a lagfest everywhere I go tonight lol

No errors with the addon, more errors with the site. :/

Last processed file was uploaded on 2013-02-16 17:59:34.
Current server time is 2013-03-06 14:09:16

Feb 16, 13 18:08:24 0 0 E
Feb 16, 13 16:24:30 0 0 E

Seems the the server hang itself on my files, because it has been looking like that for pretty long while already.

Ok, so anyone know what the story is with submissions taking so long to be processed? I'm an IT guy and I have some spare hardware that I don't have much use for and it sounds like the site needs more hardware. So anyone know how I can help or something? I've been using this site for years and I'd hate to see all this information disappear into the void of time. It's nice to look up my really old characters and see their progression over the years.

Just because I'm curious.. how does all this stuff work? What hardware and software is used to keep all this info? Anybody know?

Only "the Shadow" knows, or I should say only Rollie knows.

But from statements he has made here in the forums and some simple internet investigation I can make a reasonable guess.

Rollie has this site setup with two servers, the public facing web server which is the host for www.warcraftrealms.com and the private side server which runs the DB engine.

I don't know which version of *inx Rollie is using.. if it is Linux based or BSD based not that it matters that much in many respects.

Rollie replaced his first server implementation back on 2-Mar-2005 with a machine he exclaimed to be a "screamer" i.e. fast, but only six days later as more and more people discovered warcraftrealms.com and another website wowcensus.com died, Rollie started his long road of struggling to keep ahead of the load we keep adding to the site.

By 24-Feb-2005 his optimizing of the MySQL processes had pushed update processing into "thousands of characters/second."

16-Oct-2006 Rollie called for help, he was looking for a broad range of skills to greatly expand how Warcraftrealms.com would look to the world, but I believe after some reconsideration he decided to not go down that path.

30-Dec-2006 Rollie rolled out the new user interface experience ... what we currently have here at the site.

30-Jan-2007 Rollie brought out the 3rd generation of the DB (Database) server

18-Jul-2008 ditto for the Web server.

Then the world changed... the US real estate debt driven stock market crash drove many business into bankruptcy. And the companies that survived pulled back, cutting all costs such as outside IT contracting and development. I'm sure Rollie got caught up in that mess since he has been busy since that time taking care of real life issues.

It is long pass time for major hardware update of the DB server and possibly the web server, the two are tied together in that most of pages delivered to your web browser are created on the fly with data from the DB server each time you refresh most pages on this site. A side effect of this is that when the DB server goes down, the web side goes non-responsive.

Pure speculation from this point.

The DB server may be based on a dual core cpu but most likely is based on an older single core chip. The MySQL database is almost certainly the 5.0 version released this and previous versions couldn't make optimal use of mutilple core cpu's. Major updates made to mysql could improve processing of uploaded data by a major factor. The other issue of the currently used implementation of MySQL is the problem the database has with extended character set handling. One of the reasons Rollie wasn't able to support our Russian players.

I expect Rollie would like to get a modern multi core system with a large Ram memory system so he could keep much of the indices in ram all the time. Possibly with SSD (Solid State Drive) for all or most of the database, since paging in and out data from mechanical hard drives is the most time consuming part of database processing. But it wouldn't make sense to spend the cash resources that would require if Rollie didn't have the time to update the software including his many PHP scripts to make use of the better hardware.

Rollie I know would love to have someone help him with the maintenance of the website. But it is his baby, and unless he had positive proof that the person(s) assisting really had a clue of what they are doing... they could break things here real quick, and make it very hard and time consuming to pick up the pieces after.

Rollie didn't have much problem when I asked to take over maintenance of the actual CensusPlus add on, considering I was limited by what Blizzard allowed and required and any additions I might have wanted to add to the uploaded data would just be ignored if it didn't fit in Rollie's specifications. Also by the time Rollie and I got in contact, I nearly had the CensusPlus update finished and had been testing with someone Rollie has a trust relationship for along time.

Or it's probably like that:

The game lost its appeal years ago, he's still clocking numerous hours coding in front of a pc, his kids grew up in the meantime so he can spent his valuable offtime outdoors with his family biking, hiking etc.

My guess is: He could spent time on the site if he wanted to but he doesn't want to. Upgrading the server is stuffing money down the drain. As long as the servers are running it's good but fixing or restructuring anything is the lowest of his priorities. Until the db is completely fubar shutting down of the site won't happen. So we have to live with the status quo.

Just my 2 cts. Sorry for my bad english.

I expect the truth is somewhere in between our two guesses.

While it is true that he is less interested in this site then any of us would like. Allowing it to totally fall apart or even just allowing it to visibly degrade as it has isn't the best thing that Rollie could do for his professional career. I say this after looking over his professional profile on various sites.

I have an i7-870k CPU(4 core + HT) and motherboard(full size ATX) that I'd gladly donate to this site if it would help. I don't have any RAM(uses DDR3) but RAM is so cheap it would require much $$$ to get it working. The system has worked great for me, but I'm onto much bigger and better things.

So Rollie.. if you are out there and you want my hardware let me know.

-Frostorb