DOTLAN EveMaps

4.5 years ago I got my first shirts and hoodies for my dotlan lanparty project. I suppose it was the best decision to reuse my own logo for the evemaps project and not only the logo 🙂 Many players on the fast were quite surprised when they saw me in my shirt running around on the fanfest 🙂 Best quote: “DOTLAN !?!? Do you work for them?” This really made me smile for the rest of the evening/night during the pubcrawl.

Some weeks ago I thought it would be time to order some new shirts and jackets (since the old  shirts started to smell, etc :-P) So here we’re . After some tests and color tweaks with a local embroidery, here’s the result. I’ll likely order more of those in the future and maybe I’ll put some up for sale. We’ll see 🙂

What do you think? Aren’t they looking great?

So what does this all above has in common? Nothing really, apart from a summary what I’ve done in the background on the server to stabilize the system and optimize the performance.

1) Crashes & XEN & Kernel

Those who have followed my rages in the past on Twitter may noticed it. Since the upgrade to debian lenny (on dom0, that’s the master system for controlling the virtualized guests) last November, I had a lot of random crashes of the xen guests (evemaps is one of those). The easiest choice was to set the number of virtual cpus (vcpu) down to 1 for every guest and it would run stable. But who’s happy to have only half the performance on a dual core system. Right.

After doing some research and talks with other people the only choice would be the kernel which was being used in debian ‘stable’ lenny. The 2.6.26 wasn’t the original kernel optimized for XEN. It was rather a kernel spiked with some strange unofficial forward patches provided by opensuse (*brrrr*).

First choice was to reinstall the dom0, but this time using CentOS 5 (clone of Redhat Enterprise Linux) who’re providing a stable OS for the master system. Reinstall went smooth and I set vcpu=2 for the guests again. Only a few hours later the first guest crashed already again *doh*, so back to vcpu=1.

Next step was to upgrade the kernel for the paravirtualized guests: Cause I was lazy I took the 2.6.32 without xen-patches, but paravirt_ops() interface from the backports repository. Everything was running stable for about 2 weeks, so decided two days ago to give vcpu=2 another try and monitor for any crashes (which were not reproduceable) since everything (xen version, all kernels) have changed so far.

But: after about 28 hours the first guest crashed again with kernel errors and while restarting the guest the whole server crashed and rebootet again.

Back to the roots (only 1 vcpu). Perhabs &%§$%§ XEN is the root cause, perhabs cpu … but nothing explain why can run stable for months with only 1 assigned cpu. Maybe I should switch to KVM one day or upgrade to better and newer hardware … we’ll see.

2) PHP & SQL Optimization

Short and quick: The usage of Zend Optimizer and eAccelerator for caching byte code compiled php scripts at runtime is working great. The average runtime per php script is usually less then 0.05 seconds.

On the SQL side I could tune some MySQL Server settings and of course find bottlenecks in sql scripts, update procedures, etc which have been optimized.

But as usual: You’ll always find something to tune and tweak.

3) NGINX: Frontend Webserver / Reverse Proxy

The newest addition was the installation of a frontend webserver which is responsible for delivering static data (like images, css, javascript), handling connection and keep alive with the client and for everything else forward (reverse proxy) the request to the internal backend webserver running the old and threaded apache. For this setup I’m using nginx. Nginx has been designed to handle multiple thousend clients with only a minimum of memory and cpu usage. Big websites like wordpress.com or sourceforge are relaying on nginx as loadbalancer, reverse proxy or simple webserver.

But nothing comes easy: After some configuration tests and dry runs on my test installation everything was looking good and stable so I deployed the setup. After a couple hours people told me that the new radar tracking feature wasn’t working anymore: Some quick checks later: The IGB Headers aren’t forwared to the backend apache anymore even the site has been trusted in the IGB Browser. After talking with some nginx people on IRC and checking the debug log I could find the root cause:

client sent invalid header line: “EVE_CHARNAME: Wollari”.

Apparently underscores “_” are invalid characters in the HTTP Header definition (bad CCP!) but there was an undocumented (until then) config option (underscores_in_headers on;) for nginx which helped in this case. If you ever wanna use nginx for eve related pages, don’t forget this option 🙂

Done

Well that’s all for the moment. I hope I could give you some insights and background knowledge. The server is running stable (even only on vcpu=1) and I could still improve a lot of smaller things here and there. And yes: I’ll still keep a close eye on OpenNMS (+ text message on my mobile) and Munin as usual to be aware of upcoming trouble.

Fly safe!

After updating the radar function 2 weeks ago I had some thoughts about expanding that feature even more. Who really needs the radar map ingame, where your game is fully packed with chats, overview, fleet windows and your modules. The majority of pilots don’t have that space available.

• You want to keep an eye on your movements and positions out-of-game?
• You want to track your movements for a later operation analysis?
• You want to provide your fleet/squad position to the the fleet commander to keep multiple squads in sync or just provide juicy details to your spy master?
• You want to visualize the route of your roaming gang for your after-action-report?

Then the new radar tracking feature is what you want!

After adding DOTLAN EveMaps to your trusted page you can start the tracking functionality. A private/public token will be generated and the page will automatically send your position to DOTLAN EveMaps so you can keep an eye on your position and moves out of game. In addition to your current position your moves will be stored as well. Those moves can shown as list or directly visualized on the maps or the universe map depending on the duration of your roaming.

You only have to keep your browser open/minimized while javascript/ajax will do the rest in the background. You can even continue to surf around. The tracking will continue anywhere on my page.

I know this tracking tool will be useful for both sides: Fleet commanders to keep better track of his fleet and squads and the spy’s for better way to update their masters.

Start tracking today

After the last birthday post and the ever growing stream of visitors and users I thought it would make sense summarize the development and numbers from the past 2 years. So I did … the outcome? A 40 pages long presentation aka the “DOTLAN EveMaps Fanpage Report 2010“.

Last weekend I had the chance to get a meeting with some CCP Devs at the GamesCom exhibition in cologne to give them a bit insight and feedback about my evemaps project and how ingame events (delve: bob + goons) are having impact on fanpages.

I still have the opinion that fanpages and 3rd party applications have a huge impact on the so called “EVE Experience“. EVE wouldn’t be the same without all those little helpers and the community behind them. I hope that this message and the need to support API and the 3rd party devs will reach the right people.

I think there’s no reason to not show this information to you all! Enjoy it!

DOTLAN EveMaps – Fanpage Report 2010

Server maintenance yesterday:

P.S. Even after the server maintenance yesterday and the reinstallation of the XEN dom0 I’m still having stability problem of the hosted guests when assigning more then 1 vcpu. But I think I should write another post about this topic in general.

Just a quick update: The Radar page (only usable in the InGame browser) will now reload if you change your current system. This has been done with a regular ajax call in the background every 20 seconds (interval may change in the future). Maybe I’ll have an additional idea about the radar page. More to come later.

Suggestion to CCP

CCP still hasn’t delivered a javascript hook where we could register functions that will be executed on a session change. We discussed about this and suggested it in the IGB round table last fanfest. I know that there’s no feedback system from the EveClient to the browser engine but as you’re delivering the IGB Headers the Browser should be able to detect a “sessionchange” and call previously registered callbacks. If there’s a chance that one of your developer gets some time this is what I would suggest. I know there’re a lot of things in the backlog, but I bet this is one of the most features IGB 3rd party developer are asking for.

# similar to the javascript event system
CCPEVE.addEvent(event, callback);
CCPEVE.removeEvent(event, callback);

Example

CCPEVE.addEvent('sessionchange', function() {
    window.location.reload();
});

This would be the easiest form of reload event and if you’ve any future events, it’s easily extendable.

It’s official: DOTLAN EveMaps is now having its 2nd birthday (starting from the official announcement in the CAOD forum section).

I’m not sure what I should really say but the last 2+ years has been a blast in aspects. Started in the beginning of 2008 and announced it only with a full handset of maps, it has become one of the biggest resources in Eve Online/New Eden’s History. Combined with the powerful toolset all around your favorite online game (Internet spaceships are serious business!).

If you like to support DOTLAN EveMaps: check out the Donate page where you can find informations on how to make me happy, expecially birthday presents are always welcome 🙂

You can also check the happy birthday thread in the official forum – CAOD

Open Teamspeak Party:

If you wanna come along to say hi, thank you or just wanna just chat with us and our friends just come along. I’ll open teamspeak on thursday evening when I get back from work (around 5pm eve time).

Teamspeak3: <teamspeak party is over>

Milestones:

The last 2 years have gained you a lot of features: Here’s a short list of what the one-man-show has brought to light:

• 2008.07.22: Initial release: just maps with their sovereignty status and one combined map of providence/catch
• 2008.09.04: Region/System listing, Alliance Ranking, Sovereignty History, System Details, Outposts, Search function
• 2008.10.24: Jumps/Kills. Alliance/Corp History, Alliance changes
• 2008.11.12: Added a blog for more updates
• 2009.02.02: Initial release of the moon mineral database
• 2009.02.13: Band of Brothers got disbanded and everbody was rushing over their former land. Everybody was looking on DOTLAN EveMaps first when it happened. 400% increase in visitors.
• 2009.02.17: Historical sovereignty maps
• 2009.02.23: Cooperation with EVSCO to show kills in the last 24h in one particular system
• 2009.03.28: Created an Intel manager for the old systems including sovereignty forecast (now decrepted)
• 2009.06.12: Brand new navigation tools (Jumpplaner, Jumprange, Routerplaner), Universe Map
• 2009.07.28: Colorized Map Overlay
• 2009.12.01: DOTLAN Dominion Edition: Complete converted database, constant stream of sovereignty, faction warfare, outpost and alliance updates, zoomable maps, new IGB Integration, complete new background daemons
• 2009.12.05: Sovereignty structure changes
• 2009.12.07: CCP disables the sovereigntyStatus API (structures) *lol*
• 2010.01.26: Jump Portal/Black Ops Fuel Calculator
• 2010.06.05: Summer update: Live Ticker, RSS Feed Support, Full alliance/corporation changes down to ceo/description level, Planet stuff, added more info’s through client cache files (complexes, landmarks)
• 2010.07.12: Switching to CCP’s image server for the source of corporation and alliance logos

What do other people thing about DOTLAN EveMaps:

Chribba, Eve-Files.com

DOTLAN EveMaps have always been my #1 stop to watch keep an eye on the potential locations of my future 0.0 cottage and wouldn’t have been as easy without it 🙂
Congrats and hope to see its continuous providance of great information!

Winterblink, Warp Drive Active Podcast

DOTLAN EveMaps is one of those shining examples of one person in the EVE community using both time and brain to create something awesome. It’s a one stop shop for the swirling mass of data which CCP externalizes, but put into a form that’s both easy to digest and totally useful. The more I play around with it, the more features I find that I didn’t realize were there before, and the more I end up using the service to mine the data it contains.

Dierdra Vaal, Director of the Eve University, CSM Member

I’ve been amazed at the way the DOTLAN EveMaps have evolved and grown. They were heavily used within Eve Uni for wormholes, and many of our FCs use the region maps. I think the DOTLAN EveMaps are the most complete eve-maps out there 🙂

Verite Rendition, Influcence Map

To me DOTLAN has become the defacto system and alliance tracker. It does something that wasn’t easy to do before: keeping a history of who holds what system, and being able to track the history and member corps of an alliance. In that respect alone it’s made it much easier to analyze the politcal situation of the game – you can’t talk politics without DOTLAN to provide the background.

More recently your additions to planet and moon contents have been quite helpful. Our corp members have been using to plan which planets to set up on for PI, and the moon list is always handy for figuring out who’s sitting on a juicy moon and should be relieved of it.

On a personal level of course, I owe you a great deal of thanks for your database backend. With CCP’s lackluster sovereignty API, it would be nearly impossible for me to continue offering my map without DOTLAN’s additional strategic index data. DOTLAN is not just a useful service in and of itself, but an excellent backend for building further services.

There was once a time where I played EVE without DOTLAN; I can’t say I’d like to return to such a time.

Mynxee, Noir., CSM 5 Chairwomon

I’m happy to provide a testimonial because you provide an awesome tool that I use frequently! I especially like the navigation features both for planning roams and capital jumps. I love the drag’n’drop feature for sorting waypoints; excellent search functionality; and wide variety of useful interactive information you provide. Thanks for a truly elegant tool…happy birthday and here’s to more years of success!

Tomcat, Leader of Wildy Inapproriate.

Truth be, ever since I found DOTLAN EveMaps I never used another map or jump planner related to eve. It was the best and still is the best one out there. When the POS manager feature was working it was also a fantastic and ground breaking thing until the chanced the way SOV worked. Simply put, When WI needed to know where to go to fail, we used DOTLAN EveMaps.

The Mittani, Goonswarm, Spy Master

DOTLAN is an invaluable strategic resource, I use it on a daily basis. Whether it’s plotting jump routes or finding an enemy’s achilles heel, this site does it all.

Vuk Lau, Leader of Morsus Mihi, CSM Member

DOTLAN is indispensable part of my daily EVE routine. Whatever information you need – you can find it on DOTLAN. If there wasn’t meatspin.biz DOTLAN would be my homepage.
Awesome work Wollari, and Happy Birthday from Morsus Mihi

Verone, Veto Corp, CEO & Executor

DOTLAN EveMaps has become the number one stop for our corporation to keep up to date with sovereignty changes and track hostile alliances, their development and their influence. It’s also become our first source of intelligence and one of our primary tools for planning operations and keeping a close eye on how our sphere of operations is changing around us due to the fully dynamic and constantly updating mapping system and alliance tracking.

Couple that with more recent additions, such as the jump planner and factional warfare tools, and all around DOTLAN offers a lot of features that no other provider can bundle together so seamlessly into one package.

Congratulations on two years, I hope to continue using DOTLAN for our intelligence and logistics planning for many more.

Seleene, CEO Body Count Inc., former CCP Game Designer (Abathur)

Of all the player initiatives to emerge from the EVE Online community, the DOTLAN EveMaps site stands as one of the most well done, informative and useful.  Whether you are an alliance leader, a capital fleet commander or just a guy looking for some corp or alliance historical data, no other site provides the depth of information in one place.

Perhaps the best example of this I can give is when I was still working for CCP, I used DOTLAN more often than I did other informational tools to answer questions related to sovereignty and alliances.  On one occasion, when we were looking at how the new sov system would feed the API, I showed a room full of people several statistics.  When asked how I had gotten the information so fast and complete, I switched over to the browser and pulled up the DOTLAN website as an example of how players were already using the API.  “This is a PLAYER-made website??”

Wollari himself is an awesome guy whom I was proud to meet and shake hands with at the last FanFest.  Happy Birthday and never stop making things better!

Lag, not only in Eve

As many of you already noticed, I had a couple outages in the last days. Those crashes mostly occurred in the late evening hours (20:00+ GMT) with very high memory usages which forced the server to start swapping and ending up in killing apache processes cause they weren’t responding anymore. Thankfully I just had to kill and restart the xen domain to get everything back online. But 2 crashes in a row withing 20 minutes isn’t funny.

I started live debugging slow queries, optimized indizes, optimized querys (over and over again), tried to remove the amount/duration of locking update/replace commands when updating the database in the background, assigned more memory (EveMaps was always running fine with only 2gb ram and has now 4gb available) and the last thing was now optimization the robots.txt cause google and other bots are having fun aswell on such a huge page with so much information all around New E. And yes, I found some situations when some chinese bots tried to request 300+ pages/map/etc within less then a minute.

Well even today I got a 4 hours ago, I suffered some very high load (load 30+) and swapping/iowait situations again. Well, atm I can just optimize and hope that the next evening it’s stable. During the rest of the day it’s always looking promising (load <0.3). I hope I get everything fixed and stable for the weekend, so I can get on holiday without having to worry about a potential crash.

Topic change: Upcoming event

On Thursday DOTLAN EveMaps gets officially 2 years. If there’s interest, I’ll open my Teamspeak 3 Server for some nice chatting in the evening. There will be a dedicated birthday posting with TS3 details coming up later.

Fly safe.

Yesterday I deployed some smaller additions and polished some features. Mostly because of the weather I’m quite lazy to sit down and write a longer blog post. So lets quickly sum up the changes

• Added the infolayer to all available map formats. For PDF Maps it’s ?overlay=type The infolayer options are the same like in the current map view
  Example: Pure_Blind-Fade-Deklein.pdf?overlay=const
• Added a new combined map:
  Tribute-and-surroundings
• Changed the source for corporation and alliance logos to CCP’s Image Server.
• Alliance member corporations and a couple other pages are showing the small corporation/alliance logo in the listing.
• The (jump)range tool now allows you to select the maximum number of gates you wanna travel in your sub-capital ship.
• The Live Ticker allows now to filter by Date or Date:Range (in the URL)
• Some more internal updates an improving like redone the map caching and info/data system, improved my api daemon background tools, created an evemail notifier, etc.

I started to write a documentation for all the URL filters and customization options for maps and other stuff.

Upcoming Event

For those who’ve followed the forum thread on CAOD from the beginning should know that something is coming up. Maybe I’ll do an open TS day event, when I find enough time after work, if there are people  out, who wanna share their thoughts and opinions on this special day. I’ll make an additional post when it’s getting closer.

Over and out. I’ll try trying not to melt 🙂 At least the data center/server temperature seems to be stable.

Today, I decided not to do any more feature additions which I had in my head, but rather I should start writing Patch Notes and make Screenshot of all the new features and improvements. I don’t want to stress you today too much with #walloftext,  so I just give you this handy CCP-style list in the hands. Flame on!

Live Ticker:

• All changes in the APIs that are being tracked by DOTLAN EveMaps are now available in the new central Live Ticker.
• Additional to the already tracked APIs (Sovereignty, Alliances, Outposts, Faction Warfare Systems), I added Corporation Changes to the overall portfolio.
• I unpacked about 8mil stored XML Files/API Results (about 35GB), nearly 2 years of data) for Corporations and replayed them all.  Alliance data got replayed as well for completing the database.
• The following change types are now being tracked:
  • Alliance changes their executive corporation
  • Corporation gets a new CEO
  • Corporation moves their HQ
  • Corporation changes their description, url or logo
• You can filter the live ticker by type (Sov, Ally, …) by action (Lost, Gain, …) or filter the changes for to one of the involved entities (Alliance, Corp, System, Constellation, Region, Faction) or a combination of multiple filters.
• RSS/Feed Support is available for all changes and filters
• I’m already waiting when the first IRC/Jabber bots start to announce sovereignty changes in your external alliance chats.

Corporation:

• Changes in the corporation that are being tracked by DOTLAN EveMaps are now stored and available (Description, Logo, Url, CEO, HQ)
• Corporation statistics are now available (memberCount)

Navigation:

• Planets in Range / Moons in Range
  • Filterable by range: Light years / by number of (gate) jumps
  • Filterable by resource type (planet type / moon mineral from DOTLAN Moon Database)
• Jump planner: added number of gate jumps between each cyno, so your cyno pilot knows, how many jumps he has to do.

System:

• Added all static DED Complexes (empire and 0.0 regions) from the local cache files (client)
• Added the newly introduced Landmarks from cache files as well (this includes the old COSMOS beacons)
• Added a new overlay filter for the map so you can easily find landmarks close to you. For details check the updated Celestial System pages.
• Updated layout for Celestial Objects: More Icons, DED/Landmarks, Agents and Stations orbiting their respective object.
• Detail pages for each object (Sun/Planet/Moon/Belt) with details about mass, radius, temperature, etc.
• Recent events per system

Outpost:

• With the help of cache files and some smaller calculations I’ve assigned every Station (including Player Build Outposts) their calculated orbit object (planet/moon)
• A lot more details could be retrieved out of the cache files (including the station description), but due to the nature of local cache files, don’t expect to get them updated frequently.

Map:

• New map info layer have been added
  • Each planet type (Temperate, Plasma, Lava, Gas, …)
  • Static DED Complexes(imported through client cache files)
  • Landmarks and COSMIC sites (imported through client cache files)
• Regional planet distribution (already announced and live)

Screenshots:

Just a quick post: Thanks to zufu, who just released the MySQL version of the database dump for Tyrannis, the planet types are already updated on DOTLAN EveMaps. Enjoy the new planetary action and plan which planet you want to conquer.

More to come in the next days!