Updates

Just wanted to let you all know that we pushed out a major update today. It's a backend update, so you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Nevertheless, I wanted to give you all a more in-depth description of what this update entails.  

Most of the updates are backend changes that will allow us to scale much better in the future. First, we've upgraded our main server from $40/month (8GB+4CPU) to $80/month (16GB+6CPU), and added a secondary $40/month machine into the mix. This should definitely help reduce lag and allow the server to handle a lot more users with ease.  We also made significant strides in enabling our code to take advantage of these additional resources. We've designed and built a custom load-balancer that we've rolled out just now. While load-balancers themselves aren't a new concept or technology, twoseven couldn't make use of any, generic load-balancer since we need to maintain a consistent notion of a 'room'. In other words, instead of sending users to random servers (in a load-balanced way) like a standard load-balancer, we need to aggregate users by room and balance these rooms across servers. Most importantly, it allows us to easily spin up new servers and throw them into the mix to mitigate surges in traffic. Obviously, our implementation, as it stands, isn't perfect, but it enables towseven to make far better use of the available resources than before.

One additional benefit of this load-balancer and update in general is that it paves the way for fast-lane queues for patrons. One of our medium-term goals is to try and keep a server restricted to just patrons so that you're always  guaranteed a good experience. We're still testing the waters with this load-balancer update, and as a result, we're only running 2 app-servers with a split of 90%-10%. The goal is to ensure that everything works and that there are no bugs/memory-leaks. If all goes well, we'll be bumping this up to 6 app-servers; each handling 16.66% of the load (ideally).

If not for all of you, none of the above would have been possible. Thank you all for your belief in, and continued support of twoseven 🙂

Now for some 'bad' news.
Our login service provider, Auth0, has a free tier that allows websites up to 7,000 Monthly Active Users (MAU). We've blown past that number in July with 15,499 MAU, and are already at 28,884 MAU for August! Insanely, the cost we would incur to continue using Auth0 as our service provider is $850/month  (https://auth0.com/pricing/) 😐! We're working on integrating a free, open-source alternate of Auth0, but this is turning out to be a whole project of its own. Hopefully, we'll be able to get this done before they cut the cord on us. Realistically, I think we'll be kicked out in another couple of weeks..tops. If that's the case, it'll be close, but we're hoping to have the alternate implementation rolled out by then.

As a consequence of this unexpected event, we've been forced to shift our focus away from some of the features/enhancements that we've been working on. We'll try and get Hulu and Theater mode out as those are really close to being done, but some of the other features may have to wait a little longer.