Then my vote is - keep multiple rules (but for the next poll: treat them as three contests running in parallel, with seperate winners, no mixed round).

QuoteNote: Only one rule with only one entry per author will not automatically lead to much more frequent contests as even then sufficient time to (mainly) design, play and (to a lesser extend) vote needs to be accounted for.

My suggestion in this regard was basically to get rid of the mixed rounds. So, still running three rules at once (just like we currently do), but we just find a winner from each individual rule, instead of having any mixed rounds. As such, it shouldn't be much different to the status quo in terms of time needed.

I suspect the response to this poll is going to be very different depending on whether an approach like this, vs basically just "keep the same frequency but one entry and one rule per contest", is the proposal.

Quote from: Simon on September 09, 2024, 10:31:23 PMThanks for looking into the performance!

The forum has custom code, looks like you've all reeled it through the update to 2.1.

-- Simon

A lot of it was from add-ons, although those needed a few tweaks to be 2.1.4 compatible. The few minor changes I could see from looking through Staff Discussion, I reimplemented.

It's been raised that the Lemmings Light theme needs more green. I'll get onto that (most likely) later this week.

Fixed in commit c3718fb. Seems there was no limits to how far you could move the camera; it was just something I intended to do (but never actually did).

I've uploaded V0.0.29.0 which includes this fix - I was going to solely upgrade to the current version of .NET and libraries used by the game, but since this causes crashes and is a pretty easy fix I slipped it in.

Uploaded V0.0.29.0. I decided to at least update it to the current version of .NET, and while I was at it, it was pretty easy to quickly add a fix for the crash when the camera goes too far from the level (by simply constraining how far the camera can go away from the level).

Changes:
[tt]> Now uses .NET 8.0 instead of the extremely outdated .NET Core 3.1.
> MonoGame and other libraries are also updated to their latest versions.
> The camera is now limited as to how far away from the level it can travel.[/tt]

Game: https://www.neolemmix.com/download.php?id=597
Music: https://www.neolemmix.com/download.php?id=530
Replays: https://www.neolemmix.com/replay/L3D_Loap_Replays.zip (unchanged from previous version)

The slow loading of the front page is now, not 100% fixed, but hugely improved.

It really just comes down to that the database query used to build the Recent Posts list, is a very slow one, and even more so when we want only one entry per topic (because we still need to filter through all the messages that aren't the latest in the topic). With that being said, the modified version from the addon that restricts it to one entry per topic, was an order of magnitude or two more inefficient than the default SMF one (seemingly for little purpose other than making the code slightly easier to write). So I made my own tweaks to this query, basically making it as close as possible to the original SMF one while still getting the extra info needed for (a) one entry per topic and (b) showing the topic's title, not the reply's subject line.

Could I maybe improve it further if I tried? Possibly. But it's good enough - the main page was taking about 1.5s longer to load than other pages on the site; now it's more like 0.1s longer, which some people won't even notice. If a future SMF update improves it, I'll certianly try to port the improvements over to the modified version, but I don't think it's all that worthwhile going out of my way.

I don't see anything in logs that suggest we had trouble overnight - no MySQL errors, no Apache errors, and the only site errors were failed logins (due to wrong passwords or not-yet-activated accounts). However, if anyone did witness the "Cannot connect to database" error after the previous message was posted, let me know.

I'll keep an eye on things today. That aside, I am aware the front page is a bit slow to load - as it's just slow, not broken, this is not as critical of a matter, but I will be looking into it soon.

I've noticed the site has been somewhat unstable since the upgrade. Taking a quick look at it now, but it's getting late here so I might just put a temp-fix (that attempts to auto-restart the database process every so often; the source of the issue is the database process randomly terminating) in place for now and take a closer look tomorrow. (EDIT: Temp-fix is in place. Should the MySQL process terminate, it'll be restarted on the next 5 minute mark. This is the best I can do for now; I'll take a closer look tomorrow if issues persist.)

I've enabled logging that should help pinpoint the cause, too.

Yeah, the new look is part of SMF 2.1.

Video embeds are a native feature in 2.1.

Updated to here.

We're now live on SMF 2.1.4. Enjoy!

Please report any issues, including anything that seems a bit off about the themes. I'm aware of some minor stuff which I'll sort out over the coming days.

Downtime will begin at (give or take a few minutes) 07:00 UTC. I've just finished conducting a "mock run" of the update (taking the existing site data, attachments, etc and running it through the upgrade process; but not pushing the final result live) based on a snapshot of the site taken a couple of hours ago; a few issues were encountered but all was worked out. So I'm now ready to go ahead with the real run (which will use a fresh snapshot of the site, taken after putting the site into maintenance mode).

https://bwgames.org/lemmings-doom

Is this it?

Yes; that's very easy to do when it's a planned and intended downtime and I was intending to do so.