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Topic: Site down AGAIN

1 Topic by AshyL4rry
I have been a member here since the very beginning and this recent bout of server problems is becoming a very large nuisance. You guys need to get this fixed ASAP. If you want to be willing to accept new members and increase the traffic you need to get your servers upgraded immediately. This is something that should never happen. The site is either slow, or like tonight, completely unavailable. I have a large amount of money in play each night and when your site completely shits the bed like tonight, I am left with money getting flushed down the drain. I am paying for a service that I have to HOPE works each night. Twice in the past 10 days the site has been completely unavailable from the key time between 6:00-7:00 PM EST. This was never an issue in the past and you guys must take action on this or else you will be losing members quickly.
6:24 pm eastern until about 7:10 eastern for me on wednesday 11/25.
i'm actually able to get on the forum, but lineup cruncher is still in a death spiral.
happy thanksgiving!!
Not trying to pile on, but I've been affected directly by both outages recently. I noticed it was slow tonight before it stopped. This time the entire site crashed pretty much during the crunch time.

I've developed my own offline tools for optimizing fanduel NBA lineups and thankfully had that to fall back on ... haven't developed it to the point where I can as gracefully lock/exclude as i can on FC, and I like being able to quickly interface with the game logs, etc. on FC ... but ... gosh ...

It's hard to pay money for something that ends up costing us EV .... ever? I mean. It is a tough business. If you are going to run a business like this the product can NEVER fail. I don't have as much on the line as guys like larry but that's really insignificant - it's the principle of it. Before the product is put out for sale, this needs to be ridiculously over-the-top as secure as it could ever be, with backups on backups.

It's not life or death, and honestly, the other services I've used have had worse problems - I still maintain that just because the other services fail more often, that does not make it acceptable for anyone to ever charge for a system that we become 100% reliant on (face it - if you've got 100 reservations and 20 minutes to figure it out, you're screwed. I think most of us that multi-enter every day take reservations banking on the fact that this product will work. When it doesn't, we are in an extremely compromised situation and ... like I said ... it is kind of insane to pay money for something that ends up losing us money (or EV, however you want to look at it).).

If it's not reliable I'd rather change my strategies and not end up with a bunch of reservations that I have to scramble to fill. I consider myself lucky to have had an offline replacement. Last time this happened, I couldn't say that. I know almost nobody else can. We are 110% reliant on this product and if that's not something that should be smart to do - please let us know.

It's tough because we had a problem, it was deliberately and swiftly "fixed" ... except ... not really. I'd rather you say 'listen its not going to work for x-days and after that it will be robust enough to handle all of our new subscribers, and then some, FOR SURE."

My two cents.

-Sean
once my 50/50's fill n draftkings, you can't back out of them.
i ended up using rotowires basic algorithm which doesn't let you select players.
i threw 2 hoops and 2 hockey lineups together and jammed them all into my 50/50's
it's like flipping coins and going "heads" really, i'm taking "that guy"
still love YOUR product when it's running at top speeds.
First let me say, as irate as you guys are, I am 100x as irate. We upgraded our sever last week in response to an outage issue we had previously. Everything seemed to be normal until today. The issue we had today seemed to be malicious in nature. We are investigating and determining what we can do to prevent anything like this from happening in the future.
Agree with the comments here. Having a shut down at lineup lock isn't acceptable and a simple sorry about your luck doesn't really suffice as it really costs a lot of money. Like others have mentioned I have a backup plan for a limited amount of lineups but not for the variety I had signed up for basing that decision on. Pretty disappointing.
We are actively looking to solve the issue, this is not something I am taking lightly by any means. I think what everyone here wants is for the system to be reliable, and trust me when I say, no one wants that more than I do. I cannot go back in time and make today not happen, but I am making more changes to prepare so if anything like this happens in the future we will be better equipped to handle and remedy the situation promptly.
All of the errors seem to be related to the database. Have you looked at creating a redundant instance of the current database and establishing a system that will use the redundant db? It seems you may also want to test your system with X amount of fake users? I know this is common in the enterprise world but perhaps it is something to consider for your business as well.
just did a ton of hockey work from 12:30 to 12:50 eastern on friday and didn't see any slowdowns or crashes so far.
I couldn't get on at lock AGAIN today...
We are not having this issue because of normal peak traffic, this is a malicious attack and we are working on mitigating the issue. Due to the nature of what is going on, I am not going to discuss this at length in a public forum, but we are working on solutions and hope to get this resolved quickly.
A helpful tip that I recently came upon; if you're using google chrome, try using a different browser. You will not be able to export directly, but you'll be able to create CSVs. Chrome is not very good with flash, and often crashes when using it. Larger combinations of lineups will naturally take a longer time (due to the way the optimizer is coded, I believe), but using internet explorer (wow, it's actually useful now) I've yet to experience a crash.
This happened to me again today. At around 6:20 est, the site began running VERY slow, to where trying to import my projections took about 10-15 minutes.

Then around 6:35 the site totally crashed. I could not get back on until lock.

I'm a VERY loyal customer for awhile now. This is twice in recent weeks. Happens again, may make me think differently, that's not a threat, I just rely on this too much. I honestly love everything you do too... Sucks.
The site never actually crashed today, but it did perform very poorly under the heavy load. I am looking into different solutions to alleviate this issue. I promise, I have been working on this problem every day, and the reason we did not actually crash completely today was because of changes I made last week. I will do whatever it takes to get this resolved, this is a big issue for us and I am treating it as such.
I'm over it now, it's very frustrating though, just glad I was focusing more on cash games today with everyone in GPP mode for the big one on FD.

It was down for me though, I didn't make that up. I kept refreshing every few minutes and the site would not load up for me. I will screenshot it if it every happens again.

Good luck fixing the issue.
Did anyone else have issues accessing the site on 12/2? I was in limbo and couldn't even get the site to load for me around the times of 5:15pm CT-6:00pm CT. I just logged in now to see if it was back up so I'm not sure what time it got back up tonight.
It was down for me yesterday from 6:30PM-6:55PM with a "waiting for available socket" error, which I figured the site was being DDoS and no connections were available, however I was able to get my projections in last second for FD/DK at 6:56PM

times are eastern.
I am working on refactoring, streamlining and improving all of the code that is powering FC. I made a bunch of changes last night / this morning. The site is behaving much better today, although it is a slightly (~85%) smaller load than yesterday. I will be making some more changes tonight, and hopefully will see very positive results tomorrow. I am also looking into all of the ways we can allow FC to become more scalable including caching servers, load balancing software and scaling our database.
Thanks Dave! The site worked much better today! Love this tool!
I have changed the way player manager operates to streamline and reduce the loading heft. If anyone does mass uploading today during crunch time, it should behave much better than it did previously. This was one of the least efficient parts of FC, so hoping this will make a larger impact. Let me know.