News - dAhub Bot Back Online

Notice

The dAhub bot is back online


Details

The reason for the downtime was a technical issue between the bot and dA's servers.  That issue has now been resolved

One of the core functions of the bot is to send points to users.  That is accomplished by sending a transaction request to dA's servers and waiting for the response.  Once the response is received, the next transaction is initiated and so on.  Over the past year it has taken longer and longer for dA's servers to respond to each transaction request.  The bot cannot proceed until that response is received.  This means that the latency on dA's servers delayed transactions and responses from the bot

I filed a Help Desk ticket about the issue six months ago when the latency had grown to 15 seconds per transaction.  Since this issue is specific to this account, I was told the issue would not be fixed.  I tried various solutions on my own to reduce the latency without success.  It became apparent that the latency was proportional to the number of transactions this account had conducted.  The more points that were sent from this account, the longer each transaction took to complete.  While there are various options to reduce the rate of new transactions, all would reach the same point eventually.  Short of moving everything to a new account there was no way to repair the fundamental latency issue

I received several complaints in early April about the bot being slow to respond.  Knowing I would need to make a change eventually, I turned to my last resort.  I set the bot to ignore the response from dA's servers and proceed directly to the next transaction immediately.  This pushed the problem from the bot to a queue on dA's servers.  I implemented this change without issue on April 12^th.  The bot operated normally for a week.  On April 18^th the bot began to send Referral Network payments at midnight as it does every week.  It is coded to send 10 transactions every 2 minutes in the ideal case.  In the past the bot waited the 30 seconds for each transaction to clear so it took significantly more than 2 minutes.  However, the settings had been changed to proceed without waiting, so the bot succeeded in sending 10 transactions every 2 minutes.  The transactions queued up quickly on dA's servers and caused excessive server strain

The staff shut down the bot shortly after the Referral Network payments started going out.  We opened a dialog and I explained the situation.  They responded by saying they would fix the root issue, but warned it could take several weeks.  I could not send points while the issue was being fixed, so the bot was offline from April 18^th through April 28^th

I am happy to report that the issue has now been fixed and transactions now take only a few seconds to clear


Commentary

I want to extend my thanks to the staff for permanently fixing this issue.  While I have contemplated various ways to mitigate the issue, each would mean a significant disruption of service and/or degradation in performance.  I am relieved that will no longer be needed

I also want to thank everyone who stuck it out for the past couple weeks.  No one likes downtime.  I have spent significant time fine-tuning the bot to avoid downtime from internal issues, but sometimes it is simply unavoidable.  Of the handful of outages this account has had over the past four years this one has had the smoothest recovery.  Thank you for your patience during the downtime.  The bot is now running normally, if not faster, than before