MochiBot Blog

The stats will be at 0 for yesterday while we work on some bugs that were caused by daylight savings time.

**UPDATE (Apr 06, 2006 @ 5:04pm PST) : Stats are back on again.

I just met with Rajat Paharia, the creator of Bunchball, a few days ago. They’re doing some really intersting work with their Flash game platform. They’ve taken the work out of creating a multi-user infrastructure and a lot of the other tedious areas of game development.

Here’s a classic game developed by the very talented Paul Neave on their platform.

The log processor decided to not cooperate last night so we’re back under the hood fixing things again. Looks like another long weekend for us so we’ll see everyone back here on Monday.

Have a great weekend!

** UPDATE - March 9, 2006 @ 2:34pm PST ** Ok that wasn’t so bad. We fixed the problem to yesterday’s stats not showing up. That doesn’t mean we won’t still have a lot to do over the weekend though. doh!

It’s been a long three days, but things are back to normal again and running smoother than ever. We’re going to be keeping a close eye on things just to make sure that everything is ok.

If you notice any quirks or bugs, then please feel free to let us know.

A lot of optimizations to the system have been made in the past two days. We’re not 100% complete with the fixes, but we’re getting there. Today you’ll see that some of your stats are back in action. The only thing that you’ll notice missing are yesterday’s stats. Don’t worry though because we’re still working on bringing them back.

The Traffic Report should give you a glimpse of what your traffic was like in the past few days. If you notice any abnormalities while using the system, then please let us know of them as we’ve been going through a lot of changes in the past few days and some bugs may have slipped through the cracks. You can send any bugs that you find to support@mochibot.com.

As you all have noticed your stats have been at 0 since Sunday. It pains me greatly to write these posts because it’s like talking about an injured son or daughter. We’re working tirelessly to fix the issue, but it’s proven to be much more daunting than we anticipated. To give you an idea of the magnitude of what we’re dealing with we’ve been taking in about 9GB of raw data every day (that translates to a hell of a lot of hits from your Flash movies). We then take that data and have to process, filter, sort, and store all of that information within a small window of time so that you can see your reports on the site. However, the processing time was taking too long (several hours) so we had to shut the processor off in order to do some work on it and speed things up.

If you have MochiBot in your Flash and are concerned about the data not showing in your reports, then let me put your mind at ease. We’re still collecting all of the information that your MochiBot sends to us, but it just hasn’t been processed yet. Once we get things up and running again you’ll see all of the stats that were captured over the past few days.

Thanks to everyone for their emails of support and appreciation of what we’re doing. This is our flesh and blood and we’re committed to making MochiBot the best that it can be.

I’ll keep posting updates as we make more progress.

We’re running through some changes with the system right now so your stats will all be at 0 or at least near 0. If you need to look at your stats, then check out the Traffic Report to see how your Flash has performed in days prior to yesterday.

Sorry for the inconvenience as we’ll have them up and running again soon.

Seeing MochiBot gain traction with the Flash development community is great! However, we never expected to grow so dramatically so suddenly. We had to deal with some tremendous increases in traffic over the past weekend and it’s taken a lot more work than we anticipated to handle the growth. You’ll notice your traffic stats are off, but worry not because we’re working on the system.

You don’t have to worry about this outage affecting your SWFs. MochiBot will have no effect on your content and any outage will be completely unnoticeable to your audience. The only effect that this outage will have is on the stats that you see on our site.

Thanks to everyone for spreading the word about MochiBot and helping us to grow. We’re working hard to manage this growth and these growing pains will result in a much improved system for everyone.

**UPDATE (Feb 28, 2006 @ 11:04am) : We’ve taken care of the backlog of data that needed to be processed and your stats should be appearing as expected on the site. If you notice any inconsisitencies, then please let us know what’s wrong by emailing us at support@mochibot.com

If you’ve noticed a dip in your traffic yesterday (Saturday, February 25), don’t worry there’s nothing wrong with your SWF. The dip in traffic was due to a brief outage that we had between 10am and 2pm yesterday. It wasn’t a complete outage, but we weren’t able to process a lot of our incoming traffic so that explains the partial traffic data.

One of our users has been using MochiBot in some content on MySpace and it got really popular so all that traffic started clogging our pipes up. It really goes to show how powerful MySpace is. They’re currently ranked #9 in Alexa and just a fraction of that traffic can be in the millions in terms of hits.

Everything is back to normal now and we’re keeping a close eye on performance. I’m heading out to Flashforward tomorrow so I’ll try to blog some highlights from the conference.

Both Bob and I will be trekking to conferences in the coming days and we’d love to meet up with some of you. Bob will be heading to PyCon in Dallas, TX tomorrow and staying for the sprint through Feb 28. I’ll be heading to Seattle, WA for Flashforward next week (Feb 27) and staying until Mar 2.

Neither of us will be speaking so we’ll be free to hang out if any of you are out at the conferences. Feel free to email us: jameson at mochimedia.com or bob at mochimedia.com.