Many of you know from personal experience, or from our article last week regarding the server connection issues, that we have been experiencing degraded performance over the last several weeks. Last weeks post on the issue was most of an acknowledgement of the situation, and did not detail anything with regards to our investigation. Which is what we hope this article will do:
Over the last several months we have released many new features for the battlemap editor. Some of these updates, like moving settings to the user profile and out of browser cache, require additional network traffic to and from the server. This additional network traffic is what appears to have inadvertently caused the rate limiting.
The obvious solution is to migrate to a new hosting provider, however that isn't as easy as it sounds for a variety of reasons. That said, we acknowledged that we needed to do something sooner than later.
The Solution - Phase 1:
Moving to another hosting provider is our final goal, in the meantime we are doing what we can to reduce the number of requests made to the server. Last week with patch v5.6.7 we fixed a bug that was downloading assets on the map that were not needed. Over the past week, we have been working on and are happy to announce that our primary asset pool has been moved to a s3 bucket with CDN delivery. Not only will this offload all asset downloads away from our server, it will, in our testing, increase download speed of assets requested.
We have already migrated all map thumbnails and the DungeonFog asset library. Over the coming weeks we will continue migration for our marketplace assets, user uploads, prop/room group images and user profile images.
Our initial testing looks promising, and have confirmed that the downloading of assets for users in the US have been nearly cut it half (individual performance may vary). We hope that these changes improves overall performance going forward as a short term solution until we are able to migrate to a new host. We provide further updates as we implement additional changes!
