Why is the Altmeta not updating?

Best as I can tell, since a couple of nights ago the metaverse has been randomly incredibly slow to serve up pages. This is causing the overall update manager to time out, and the scheduled job on the server tries to access it again ater five minutes... over and over, so it never finishes and just keeps refreshing (some of) the empire rosters only.

For reference, as late as Tuesday the updates were only taking three minutes at most. Typically there's less to check and it finishes in less than half that time.

I'm not sure if there's much I can do at this point since the issue seems to be on the metaverse end. The roster updates are necessary as that's how it tells who has changed scores that it needs to look into.

Thanks mate, the post was as much to bring the issue to your attention as it was for info, but you were already aware of it. Hope the Mv sorts itself out soon, 'cause once the the AM does update fully i am looking forward to claiming #1 in Universal class.

I really want that #1 banner....

Update - I've hacked together a bit of code to make it (hopefully) pick up where it left off if it notices that the log was terminated abnormally. We'll see if that at least lets it muddle through the timeouts and get the job done anyway.

Actually I wasn't, I just investigated it before replying is all :p

Ok, it seems to be limping through the process. Should be updated... eventually. Thankfully since the second step of the update process (scanning character pages for those whose metascores have changed since the last update) already filters out those that have already been scanned by its very nature, so as long as it can make it past the rosters eventually it should be able to finish the job.

Update finished. So it looks like it should be able to get through it (so long as it can be done in less than twenty time-outs, which seems to be the server's limit).

It still doesnt seem to be right. My empire stats are off by quite a bit. Membership rank dropped from #1 to #5, & activity rank from #1 to #2, lost about 10 million from the all-time total, and alt-score dropped by about 2 million. There were no changes to my empire that would legitimately cause any of those. It doesnt seem like it pulled all my members from the MV.

I dont know if other empires have noticed anything similar too.

Thanks for looking into it.

Sentient species taste better...

Ya the Kzinti are way off...if you look at your members...it list only about 80. Surely you have more than 80 ranked members in the last 6 months. And yes, i too noticed the drop in points in Alt score..at first i was elated....we had caught you by over 1 million points but alas that elation was short lived as i noticed something wasn't right.

Thanks for updating Kryo...i can now splash by #1 banner about... :LOL:

Argh. I've added a bit more fail checking and some basic retry support, as it looks like it was failing during the update on some rosters (such as Kzinti) and not saying anything. It should be up to date now, but I'll have to keep an eye on it. At least I'll be able to see in the log if it missed anyone now, though.

It looks like it is fixed now. Thanks Kryo! I've been watching the AltMeta closely the last few days, because soon the Kzinti will overtake the Diplomats for #1 all-time total! Only 36k to go...

Sentient species taste better...

Allright, all the extra stuff seems to be letting it get finished with minimal issues. Only one empire roster update exceeded the max retry count and failed over the past four updates, but it picked it up on the next update.

Hmmm the AM seems to be slow again. What is the update time for the AltMeta? It has been nearly 9 hours since my last game and in that time the MV has updated.

The AM was updating about the same time i had thought.

It seems to have not updated for about 1.5 - 2 days now. Games I submitted arent showing up on my character graph.

Sentient species taste better...

It must be all the kitty litter clogging the website

...soo...many...cats...to...keep...up...with...

Not my fault this time... looks like cron stopped on the server as has happened once before. I'll poke the host's support about it, they should have it up in time for today's noon update.

:LOL:  One word. Pooper-Scooper.

Opps. I guess that's two words. My bad.  :LOL: 

We dont need kitty-litter in space....that's what airlocks are for.

Sentient species taste better...

The AltMeta did update but it's incomplete again. The majority of the members of my empire are missing, as happened before. It looks like people from the lower ranks didnt make it into the data.

Sentient species taste better...

Yep, three empires failed on the overnight update. Kzinti, HCH, and the Diplomats. About all I can do is increase the max number of retries at this point, but if it fails three times in a row it's not likely to work again so soon. It only seems to happen from time to time though, so the next update (every 12 hours) usually picks it up.

Argh. So I just spent the past couple of hours rewriting the update handler basically from scratch to record its progress in an easily parsed way and handle failures appropriately rather than trying to limp by on the crappy hacked-in retry code from last week... try it out, and for the first time since this started, the update went flawlessly. No timeouts, no retries... whole thing took about four minutes and done.

You might think that's a good thing, but the nub here is that I was thus unable to see if the new retry stuff works at all. Let's hope at least that things keep working and it becomes entirely unnecessary...

For those interested, if something looks funny about the altmeta (like an update was botched), check the log here. It's pretty straightforward--R/C means it's checking a roster (empire) or character, followed by the ID number (found at the end of your page's url). Each dot represents one try, followed by an 'ok' when it has succeeded.

Too many cats. Just truncate after 100.

Thanks for all the effort and hard work Kryo!



When I was a kid and my mother asked my what I wanted to do when I grew up, often my response was, "I want to own a mountain in Vermont full of cats!" I do live in VT now, and I have two cats...just need the mountain and quite a few more cats.

Sentient species taste better...

I was just kidding of course.


A mountain in Vermont may very well come with its own cats. There are plenty of Bobcat, which can be trapped for their fur during the first two weeks of December.

There are also Lynx which are protected and rare since Vermont is the southern end of their range.

Before looking it up I thought that Bobcats and Lynx were different names for the same species but they're not.

The Eastern Cougar is highly endangered with a known population of only about 50 but there have been a number of recent reported sightings in Northeastern Vermont.

There has always been a lot of debate as to whether catamounts (as the couger is called here) actually lives in VT. Nobody has been able to prove it yet. Also, NE VT is called the Northeast Kingdom by people here, but I'm not actually sure why, not being from VT originally.

Sentient species taste better...

Hmmm it has been over 24 hours since the Am lasted updated.....perhaps the sheer volume of games being submitted atm...blame me and TorontoRock for that...is overwhelmed the AM?