Please bear with us, folks. Some music is available to pass the time.

[Jeru]

Server Overload

We apologize if you've been running into trouble downloading 0 A.D. today. Some popular websites have been talking about 0 A.D. recently, and the server is a bit overloaded. (Willkommen, Golem.de surfers!)

We hope to have a better distribution mechanism set up by the end of March, so if you've been having problems, you're welcome to subscribe to our news feed and wait a week or two until it's ready.

The Data

When we said WorksWithU and some German-language websites have been sending traffic our way yesterday, we were looking at this graph:

(x axis denotes days of the month)

But it turns out that jump, pictured below on Tuesday at about 18:00, was dwarfed by today's traffic:

Our programmer Philip (also known as Ykkrosh) writes: "The gaps on the right are where the server was overloaded and the logging process got jammed, and where it helpfully decided to reboot while I was increasing the hardware resources. I've limited it to 30Mbit/sec now, and replaced the Trac BuildInstructions page with a cached static file, and it seems mostly stable for now."

The Music

While you're looking at screenshots and graphs, you're welcome to listen to the music of 0 A.D., now embedded into our audio page. More music and sound will be introduced soon by our music and sound department leader, Matt Sherman.

[fabio]

I noticed that inside the svn there are also windows binaries that get updated regularly. This make 'svn up' slow and increases the svn tarball. What about moving them to an http server?

[Ykkrosh]

That would make it awkward for Windows developers to keep up to date - it might be okay for programmers, but I don't want to make it more complex for artists and designers etc and require them all to mess around with downloading extra files from a different server and extracting into the right locations and updating whenever it changes. Keeping all the files in the source control system also helps a lot with debugging, since we can trivially go back precisely to any given point in the past and use the old debug symbols and matching code.

It would be possible to set up a secondary SVN URL which filters out the Windows binaries and libraries (using SVN's authz stuff) - I think that could be useful, but it'll take a little work and it hasn't been a priority yet. Might set it up in the near future, though.

Ideally most people wouldn't download from SVN at all - they'd download some kind of .tar.bz2 that has just the Linux source code and data files from a recent relatively-stable release, and all the irrelevant Windows stuff would be excluded from that. That's what I was planning to do in a week or two, but then all these people came and unexpectedly started downloading it now

[wrut]

Not me:) I haven't synced it for weeks or so.