Funding Update: Website Performance

Hello Everyone,

Thank you to all of you supporters for supporting us, it's been a while since our last update regarding what we're spending the money from patreon on and I thought I'd give you a little blog into where it's been going.

The Problem

Recently we've seen a few performance dips on the website; specifically when nords was released and we had a few 150+ driver events mainly because of the constant refreshing of the page to try and get the server details for the servers.

The diagnosis

There was a couple of reasons behind this; mainly that the servers would "clog" up with all the traffic waiting for the server details to come through whilst everyone was refreshing to try and find their server details.

The solution

• We separated the server information from the event, and it now auto-updates and tells you what split you're in if you're on the event page.

• We also added more caching to queries across the website so you're not ALWAYS getting live data, but it should ALWAYS still be accurate data, if it isn't wait a few minutes and refresh and it'll be accurate again.

• The big one, we incorporated auto-scaling on the website servers, this does come with a significant cost vs previously but with the recent uptick in patreon subscriptions we were luckily able to afford it which means when the "peak" of traffic starts to happen, the website will scale dynamically to cope with the demand up to a certain limit; and we're hoping when the website continues to grow, so does the patreon subscriptions so we can just up the auto-scaling to cope with demand.

The 3rd solution we are actively monitoring to ensure that it does not scale out of control and use up all of the funding available to us, however as far as we can see, it seems to be working quite well!

Hope this gives you a little "behind-the-scenes" as to how we're using your support to continue supporting the community and improve your user experience across the site.

We are also working on some new patreon features, however as our development team is voluntary it's when/if they get the time to do so.

Again, thank you for the continued support, we greatly appreciate it!