Hello everyone,

in the last week we had two major events with key persons of FAF history stepping out of the picture.

Last Sunday on the first regular general meeting of the FAF association we elected a new board. With this election Sheeo effectively steps down from running FAF business for the assocation as a president/board member and previously from the FAForever LLC after more than half a decade.

And today we finally transferred the last (but super import) asset of FAForever: the domain ownership and DNS access. As my dashboard is showing me so nicely I can tell you that Visionik took over the domain from ZePilot on 28th October 2014. For multiple years he invested a lot of time and money to keep things running while slowly stepping out of operational business.

On behalf of the FAForever association and the FAF community I'd like to say: Thank you for your engagement over such a big period of time. Without you FAForever wouldn't be what it is today.

We promise not to break it.

(version from 07.07.2021)

Introduction

This code of conduct applies to all spaces managed by the FAForever project, including IRC, Forum, Discord, Zulip, issue trackers, wikis, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, and any other communication channel used by our communities.

We expect this code of conduct to be honored by everyone who participates in the FAForever community formally or informally, or claims any affiliation with the Association, in any FAF-related activities and especially when representing FAF, in any role.

This code is not exhaustive or complete. It serves to distill our common understanding of a collaborative, shared environment and goals. We expect it to be followed in spirit as much as in the letter, so that it can enrich all of us and the technical communities in which we participate.

The Code of Conduct may be supplemented by further rules specifying desired and undesired behaviour in certain areas.

Specific Guidelines

We strive to:

1. Be open. We invite anyone to participate in our community. We preferably use public methods of communication for project-related messages, unless discussing something sensitive. This applies to messages for help or project-related support, too; not only is a public support request much more likely to result in an answer to a question, it also makes sure that any inadvertent mistakes made by people answering will be more easily detected and corrected.

2. Be empathetic*, welcoming, friendly, and patient. We work together to resolve conflict, assume good intentions, and do our best to act in an empathetic fashion. We may all experience some frustration from time to time, but we do not allow frustration to turn into a personal attack. A community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one. We should be respectful when dealing with other community members as well as with people outside our community.

3. Be collaborative. Our work will be used by other people, and in turn we will depend on the work of others. When we make something for the benefit of the project, we are willing to explain to others how it works, so that they can build on the work to make it even better. Any decision we make will affect users and colleagues, and we take those consequences seriously when making decisions.

4. Be inquisitive. Nobody knows everything! Asking questions early avoids many problems later, so questions are encouraged, though they may be directed to the appropriate forum. Those who are asked should be responsive and helpful, within the context of our shared goal of improving the FAForever project.

5. Be careful in the words that we choose. Whether we are participating as professionals or volunteers, we value professionalism in all interactions, and take responsibility for our own speech. Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other participants. Harassment and other exclusionary behaviour is not acceptable. This includes, but is not limited to:

   • Violent threats or language directed against another person.
   • Sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
   • Posting sexually explicit or violent material.
   • Posting (or threatening to post) other people's personally identifying information ("doxing").
   • Sharing private content, such as emails sent privately or non-publicly, or unlogged forums such as IRC channel history.
   • Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms.
   • Unwelcome sexual attention.
   • Excessive or unnecessary profanity.
   • Repeated harassment of others. In general, if someone asks you to stop, then stop.
   • Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behaviour.

6. Be concise. Keep in mind that what you write once will be read by hundreds of persons. Writing a short message means people can understand the conversation as efficiently as possible. Short messages should always strive to be empathetic, welcoming, friendly and patient. When a long explanation is necessary, consider adding a summary.
   Try to bring new ideas to a conversation so that each message adds something unique to the thread, keeping in mind that the rest of the thread still contains the other messages with arguments that have already been made.
   Try to stay on topic, especially in discussions that are already fairly large.

7. Step down considerately. Members of every project come and go. When somebody leaves or disengages from the project they should tell people they are leaving and take the proper steps to ensure that others can pick up where they left off. In doing so, they should remain respectful of those who continue to participate in the project and should not misrepresent the project's goals or achievements. Likewise, community members should respect any individual's choice to leave the project.

Diversity Statement

FAForever welcomes and encourages participation by everyone. We are committed to being a community that everyone feels good about joining. Although we may not be able to satisfy everyone, we will always work to treat everyone well.

No matter how you identify yourself or how others perceive you: we welcome you. Though no list can hope to be comprehensive, we explicitly honour diversity in: age, culture, ethnicity, genotype, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, neurotype, phenotype, political beliefs, profession, race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, subculture and technical ability.

Though we welcome people fluent in all languages, all official FAForever communication is conducted in English. Translations may be provided, but in case of contradictory wording, the English version takes precedence.

Standards for behaviour in the FAForever community are detailed in the Code of Conduct above. We expect participants in our community to meet these standards in all their interactions and to help others to do so as well.

Reporting Guidelines

While this code of conduct should be adhered to by community members, we recognize that sometimes people may have a bad day, or be unaware of some of the guidelines in this code of conduct. If you believe someone is violating this code of conduct, you may reply to them and point out this code of conduct. Such messages may be in public or in private, whatever is most appropriate. Assume good faith; it is more likely that participants are unaware of their bad behaviour than that they intentionally try to degrade the quality of the discussion. Should there be difficulties in dealing with the situation, you may report your compliance issues in confidence to either:

• The moderation team members indicated in our communication mediums
• The president of the FAForever association: Sheeo (admin at faforever dot org)
• Any other board member of the association as listed in our association forum.

If the violation is in documentation or code, for example inappropriate pronoun usage or word choice within official documentation, we ask that people report these privately to the project maintainers or to the DevOps Team Lead (Brutus5000, brutus5000 at faforever dot com).

Endnotes

* This Code defines empathy as "a vicarious participation in the emotions, ideas, or opinions of others; the ability to imagine oneself in the condition or predicament of another." Empathetic is the adjectival form of empathy.

This statement was shamelessly copied and modified from the Apache Software Foundation Code Of Conduct and it’s honoured predecessors.

Hello there,

recently I got asked a lot why we can't solve FAFs infrastructure related problems and outages with investing more money into it. This is a fair question, but so far I backed out of investing the time to explain it.

Feel free to ask additional questions, I probably won't cover everything in the first attempt. I might update this post according to your questions.

The implications of an open source project

When Vision bought FAF from ZePilot, he released all source code under open source licenses for a very good reason: Keeping FAF open source ensures that no matter what happens, in the ultimate worst case, other people can take the source code and run FAF on their own.

The FAF principles

To keep this goal, we need to follow a few principles:

1. All software services used in FAF must be open source, not just the ones written for FAF, but the complementary ones as well. => Every interested person has access to all pieces.
2. Every developer should be capable to run FAF core on a local machine. => Every interested person can start developing on standard hardware.
3. Every developer should be capable of replicating the whole setup. => Should FAF ever close down someone else can run a copy of it without needing a master’s degree in FAFology or be a professional IT SysAdmin.
4. The use of external services should be avoided as they cost money and can go out of business. => Every interested person can run a clone of FAF on every hoster in the world.

Software setup

Since the beginning, but evermore growing, the FAF ecosystem has expanded and included many additional software pieces that interact with what I call the "core components".

As of now running a fully fledged FAF requires you to operate 30 (!!) different services. As stated earlier due to our principles every single one of these is open source too.

As you can imagine this huge amount of different services serves very different purposes and requirements. Some of them are tightly coupled with others, such as IRC is an essential part of the FAF experience, while others can mostly run standalone like our wiki. For some purposes we didn't have any choice what to use, but are happy that there is at least one software meeting our requirements. Some software services were build in a time, when distributed systems, zero-downtime maintenance and high-availability weren't goals for small non-commercial projects. As a result they barely support such "modern" approaches on running software.

Current Architecture

The simple single

FAF was started as a one-man project as a student hobby project. It's main purpose was to keep a game alive that was about to be abandoned by its publisher. At that time nobody imagined that 300k users might register there, that 10 million replays would be stored or that 2100 user login at the same time.

From the core FAF was build to run on a single machine, with all services running as a single monolithic instance. There are lots of benefits there:

• From a software perspective this simplifies a few things: Network failures between services are impossible. Latency between services is not a problem. All services can access all files from other services if required. Correctly configured there is not much that can happen.
• It reduces the administration effort (permissions, housekeeping, monitoring, updates) to one main and one test server.
• There is only one place where backups need to be made.
• It all fits into a huge docker-compose stack which also achieves principles #2 and #3.
• Resource sharing:
  ** "Generic" services such as MySQL or RabbitMQ can be reused for different use cases with no additional setup required.
  ** Overall in the server: Not all apps take the same CPU usage at the same time. Having them on the same machine reduces the overall need for CPU performance.
• Cost benefits are huge, as we have one machine containing lots of CPU power, RAM and disk space. In modern cloud instances you pay for each of these individually.

In this setup the only way to scale up is by using a bigger machines ("vertical scaling"). This is what we did in the past.

Single point of failures everywhere

A single point of failure is a single component that will take down or degrade the system as a whole if it fails. For FAF that means: You can't play a game.

Currently FAF is full of them:

• If the main server crashes or is degraded because of an attack basically or other reasons (e.g. disk full) all services become unavailable.
• If Traefik (our reverse proxy) goes gown, all web services go down.
• If the MySQL database goes down, the lobby server, the user service, the api, the replay server, wordpress (and therefore the news on the website), the wiki, the irc services go down as well.
• If the user service or Ory Hydra goes down, nobody can login with the client.
• If the lobby server goes down, nobody can login with the client or play a game.
• If the api goes down, nobody can start a new game or login into some services, also the voting goes down.
• If coturn goes down, current games die and no new games can be played unless you can live with the ping caused by the roundtrip to our Australian coturn server.
• If the content server goes down, the clients can't download remote configuration and the client crashes on launch. Connected players can't download patches, maps, mods or replays anymore.

At first, the list may look like an unfathomable catalogue of risks, but in practice the risk on a single server is moderate - usually.

Problem analysis

FAF has many bugs, issues and problems. Not all of them are critical, but for sure all of them are annoying.

Downtime history

We had known downtimes in the past because of:

• Global DNS issues
• Regular server updates
• Server performance degrading by DoS
• Server disk running full
• MySQL and/or API overloaded because of misbehaving internal services
• MySQL/API overload because of bad caching setup in api and clients
• MySQL and/or API overload because too many users online

The main problem here, is to figure out what actually causes a downtime or degradation of service. It's not always obvious. Especially the last 3 items look pretty much the same from a server monitoring perspective.

The last item is the only one that can be solved by scaling to a more to a more juicy server! And even than in many cases it's not required but can be avoided by tweaking the system even more.

I hope it comes clear that just throwing money at a more juicy server can only prevent a small fraction of downtime reason from happening.

Complexity & Personnel situation

As aforementioned, FAF runs on a complex setup of 30 different services on a docker compose stack on a manually managed setup.
On top of that we also develop our own client using these services.

Let's put this into perspective:
I'm a professional software engineer. In the last 3 years I worked on a b2b product (=> required availability Mo-Fr 9 to 5, excluding public holidays) that has 8 full time devs, 1 full time linux admin / devops expert and 2 business experts and several customer support teams.

FAF on the other hand has roughly estimated 2-3x the complexity of said product. It runs 24/7 and special attention on public holidays. It uses

We have no full time developers, we have no full time server admins, we have no support team. There are 2 people with server access who do that in their free time after their regular work. There are 4-5 recurring core contributors working on the backend and a lot more rogue ones who occasionally add stuff.

(Sometimes it makes me wonder how we ever got this far.)

Why hiring people is not an option

It seems obvious that if we can't solve problems by throwing money for a better server, then we maybe should throw money at people and start hiring them.

This is a multi-dimensional problem.

Costs

I'm from Germany and therefore I know that contracting an experienced software developer as a freelancer from west-europe working full time costs between 70k-140k€ per year.
That would be 5800€-11500€ a month. Remember: Our total Patreon income as of now is roundabout 600€.

So let's get cheaper. I'm working with highly qualified romanian colleagues and they are much cheaper. You get the same there for probably 30k € per year.
Even a 50% part time developer would exceed the Patreon income twice with 1250€ per month.

Skills and motivation

Imagine you are the one and only full time paid FAF developer. You need a huge skillset to work on everything:

• Linux / server administration
• Docker
• Java, Spring, JavaFX
• Python
• JavaScript
• C#
• Bash
• SQL
• Network stack (TCP/IP, ICE)
• All the weird other services we use

This takes quite a while and at the beginning you won't be that productive. But eventually once you master all this or even half of it, your market value has probably doubled or tripled and now you can earn much more money.

If you just came for the money, why would you stay if you can now earn double? This is not dry theory, for freelancers this is totally normal and in the regions such as east-europe this is also much more common for regularly paid employees.

So after our developer went through the pain and learned all that hard stuff, after 2,3 years he leaves. And the cycle begins anew.

Probably no external developer will ever have the intrinsic motivation to stay at FAF since there is no perspective.

Competing with the volunteers

So assume we hired a developer and you are a senior FAF veteran.

Scenario 1)

Who's gonna teach him? You? So he get's paid and you don't? That's not fair. I leave.

This is the one I would expect from the majority of contributors (even myself). I personally find it hard to see Gyle earning 1000€ a month and myself getting nothing (to be fair I never asked to be paid or opened a Patreon so there is technically no reason to complain).

Scenario 2)

Woah I'm so overworked and their is finally someone else to do it. I can finally start playing rather doing dev work.

In this scenario while we wouldn't drive contributors away, the total work done might still remain the same or even decline.

Scenario 3)

Yeah I'm the one who got hired. Cool. But now it's my job and I don't want to lose fun. Instead of working from 20:00 to 02:00 I'll just keep it from 9 to 5.

This is what would probably happen if you hired me. You can't work on the same thing day and night. In total you might invest a little more time, but not that much. Of course you are still more concentrated if it's your main job rather then doing it after your main job.

Who is the boss?

So assume we hired a developer. Are the FAF veterans telling the developer what to do? Or is the developer guiding the team now? Everybody has different opinions, but now one dude has a significant amount of time and can push through all the changes and ignore previous "gentlemen agreements".

Is it the main task to merge the pull requests of other contributors? Should he work only on ground works?

This would be a very difficult task. Or maybe not? I don't know.

Nobody works 24/7

Even if you hire one developer, FAF still runs 24/7. So there is 16 hours where theres no developer available. A developer is on vacation and not available during public holidays.

One developer doesn't solve all problems. But he creates many new ones.

Alternative options

So if throwing money at one server doesn't work and hiring a developer doesn't work, what can we do with our money?
How about:

• Buying more than one server!
• Outsource the complexity!

How do big companies achieve high availability? They don't run stuff critical parts on one server, but on multiple servers instead. The idea behind this is to remove any single point of failures.

First of all Dr. Google tells you how that works:

Dr. Google: Instead of one server you have n servers. Each application should run on at least two servers simultaneously, so the service keeps running if one server or application dies.

You: But what happens if the other server or application dies too?

Dr. Google: Well in best case you have some kind of orchestrator running that makes sure, that as soon as one app or one server dies it is either restarted on the same server or started on another server.

You: But how do I know if my app or the server died?

Dr. Google: In order to achieve that all services need to offer a healthcheck endpoint. That is basically a website that the orchestrator can call on your service, to see if it is still working.

You: But now domains such as api.faforever.com need to point to two servers?

Dr. Google: Now you need to put in a loadbalancer. That will forward user requests to one of the services.

You: But wait a second. If my application can be anywhere, where does content server read the files from? Or the replay server write them to?

Dr. Google: Well, in order to make this work you no longer just store it on the disk of the server you are running on, but on a storage place in the network. It's called CEPH storage.

You: But how do I monitor all my apps and servers now?

Dr. Google: Don't worry there are industry standard tools to scrape your services and collect data.

Sounds complicated? Yes it is. But fortunately there is an industry standard called Kubernetes that orchestrates service in a cluster on top of Docker (reminder: Docker is what you use already).

You: Great. But wait a second, can Kubernetes you even run 2 parallel databases?

Dr. Google: No. That's something you need to setup and configure manually.

You: But I don't want to do that?!

Dr. Google: Don't worry. You can rent a high-available database from us.

You: Hmm not so great. How about RabbitMQ?

Dr. Google: That has a high availability mode, it's easy to setup it just halves your performance and breaks every now and then... or you just rent it from our partner int the marketplace!

You: Ooookay? Well at least we have a solution right? So I guess the replay server can run twice right?

Dr. Google: Eeerm no. Imagine your game has 4 players and 2 of them end up on the one replay server and 2 end up on the other. So why don't you store 2 replays?

You: Well that might work hmm no idea. But the lobby server. That will work right?

Dr. Google: No! The lobby server keeps all state in memory. Depending on which one you connect to, you will only see the games on that one. You need to put the state into redis. Your containers need to be stateless! And don't forget to have a high available redis!

You: Let me guess: I can find it on your marketplace?

Dr. Google: We have a fast learner here!

You: Tell me the truth. Does clustering work with FAF at all?

Dr. Google: No it does not, at least not without larger rewrites of several applications. Also many of the apps you use aren't capable of running in multiple instances so you need to replace them or enhance them. But you want to reduce downtimes right? Riiiight?

-- 4 years later --

You: Oooh I finally did that. Can we move to the cluster now?

Dr. Google: Sure! That's 270$ a month for the HA-managed MySQL database. 150$ for the HA-managed RabbitMQ, 50$ for the HA-managed redis, 40$ a month for the 1TB cloud storage and 500$ for the traffic it causes. Don't forget your Kubernetes nodes, you need roundabout 2x 8 cores for 250$, and 2* 12GB RAM for 50$, 30$ for the stackdriver logging. That's at total of 1340$ per month. Oh wait you also needed a test server...??

You: But on Hetzner I only paid 75$ per month!!

Dr. Google: Yes but it wasn't managed and HIGHLY AVAILABLE.

You: But then you run it all for me and it's always available right?

Dr. Google: Yes of course... I mean... You still need to size your cluster right, deploy the apps to kubernetes, setup the monitoring, configure the ingress routes, oh and we reserve one slot per week where we are allowed to restart the database for upd... OH GOD HE PULLED A GUN!!

Sometimes people ask us: Can't you just stop changing things and leave FAF as it is? The answer is no, if we do that FAF will eventually die. And today I'd like to explain why.

Preface

Do you still use Windows XP? According to some FAF users the best operating system ever. Or Winamp? Or Netscape Navigator? Or a device with Android 2.3?

Probably not. And with good reason: Software gets old and breaks. Maybe the installation fails, maybe it throws weird errors, maybe it's unusable now because it was build for tiny screen resolutions, maybe it depends on an internet service that no longer exists. There are all sorts of reasons that software breaks.

But what is the cause? And what does that mean for FAF?

Simplification and division of labor: About programming languages and libraries

People are lazy and want to make their lives easier. When the first computers were produced, they could only be programmed in machine language (assembler). In the 80s and 90s some very successful games like Transport Tycoon were written in assembler. This is still possible, but hardly anyone does it anymore. Effort and complexity are high and it works only on the processor whose dialect you program.

Nowadays we write and develop software in a high level language like C++, Java or Python. Some smart people then came up with the idea that it might not make much sense to program the same thing over and over again in every application: Opening files, loading data from the internet or playing music on the speakers. The idea of the library was born. In software development, a library is a collection of functions in code that any other developer can use without knowing the content in detail.

These libraries have yet another name, which sheds more light on the crux of the matter: dependencies. As soon as I as a developer use a library, my program is dependent on this library. Because without the library I cannot build and start my application. In times of the internet this is not a problem, because nothing gets lost. But the problem is a different one, we will get to that now.

The software life cycle

Even if it sounds banal, every piece of software (including the libraries mentioned) goes through a life cycle.
At the very beginning, the software is still very unstable and has few features. Often one speaks also of alpha and beta versions. This is not relevant for us, because we do not use them in FAF.

After that a software matures. More features. More people start using them. What happens? More bugs are found! Sometimes they are small, e.g. a wrong calculation, but sometimes they are big or security related problems. Those that crash your computer or allow malicious attackers to gain full access to the computer they are running on. Both on the FAF Server and on your computer at home a nightmare. So such bugs have to be fixed. And now?

Scenario A:
A new release is built. But: A new release of a dependency alone does not solve any problems. It must also be used in the applications that build on it! This means that all "upstream" projects based on it must also build a new release. And now imagine you use library X, which uses library Y, which in turn uses library Z. This may take some time. And 3 layers of libraries are still few. Many complex projects have dependencies up to 10 levels deep or more.

Scenario B:
There is no new release.

• The company has discontinued the product, has another new product or is bankrupt.
• The only developer has been hit by a bus or is fed up with his community and now only plays Fortnite.

Finally, all commercial software will end up in scenario B at the end of its life cycle. And in most cases open source software also builds on top commercial software directly or indirectly.

Just a few examples:

• All Windows versions before Windows 10 are no longer developed. They have known security issues and you are advised to no longer use them.
• The latest Direct X versions are only available on the latest Windows
• Almost all Firefox versions older than 1 release are no longer supported (with a few exceptions)

What happens at the end of the lifecycle?
For a short period of time, probably nothing. But at some point shit hits the fan. Real world examples:

• When people upgrade their operating system to Windows XP or newer some older Install Shield Wizards doesn't work anymore. Suddenly your precious Anno 1602 fails to install.
• Your software assume the users Windows installation has a DVD codec or some ancient weird video codec to be installed, but Microsoft stopped shipping it in Windows 10 to save a few bucks.
• There is an incompatibility in a version of Microsofts Visual C++ redistributable (if you ever wondered what that is, it's a C++ library for Windows available in a few hundred partially incompatible versions)

The impact on FAF

FAF has hundreds of dependencies. Some are managed by other organisations (e.g. the Spring framework for Java handles literally thousands of dependencies), but most are managed by ourselves.

A few examples that have cost us a lot of effort:

• Operating system upgrades on the server
• Python 2 is no longer supported, Python 3 is only supported until version 3.4 (affects Python client, lobby server, replay server)
• Qt 4 was no longer supported (affected Python client), we needed to migrate to Qt5
• All Java versions prior to 11 are no longer supported by Oracle (concerns API and Java client)
• Windows updates affects all clients
• Microsofts weird integration of OneDrive into Windows causes weird errors to pop up

Many of these changes required larger changes in the software codebases and also impacted the behavior of code. As source of new bugs to arise.

If we would freeze time and nothing would change, then all this would be no problem. But the software environment changes, whether we as developers want it to or not. You as a user install a new Windows, you download updates, you buy new computers, there is no way (and no reason) for us to prevent this.

And we must and want FAF to run on modern computers. And of course we want to make bug fixes from our dependencies available to you. So we need to adapt. FAF is alive. And life is change. But unfortunately in software change also brings new errors.

Everytime we upgrade a dependency we might introduce new bugs. And since we're not a million dollar company, we have no QA team to find this bugs before shipping.

The ICE adapter disagrees.

Hello everybody,

we apologize for the technical issues in the last 2 days. Nevertheless the vote ended and Morax is the official winner of the election.

We thank FtxCommando for his service in the last 2 years.

Voting details

The mode of vote was instant run off. So every round we eliminate the candidate with the least votes and transfer his votes to whatever the voter has defined as the next fallback vote.
Since we only had 3 candidates that makes it fairly easy to lookup.

Results of the 1st iteration (primary votes):

Votes	Candiate
289	Morax
201	Emperor_Penguin
175	FtXCommando
4	nobody

FtXCommando is last and his 175 votes are transferred to:

Votes	Candiate
96	Morax
46	Emperor_Penguin
33	nobody

This gives us results of the 2nd iteration:

Votes	Candiate
385	Morax
247	Emperor_Penguin

As it's only 2 candidates left, the one with the majority wins. In this case it's Morax.

Voting distribution over time

Also people wanted to know when was voted and if we can shorten future voting periods. Here is some data:

Day of Vote	# of votes	% of total votes	Accumulative %
1	283	42,2 %	42,2 %
2	79	11,8 %	54,0 %
3	31	4,6 %	58,7 %
4	10	1,5 %	60,1 %
5	10	1,5 %	61,6 %
6	14	2,1 %	63,7 %
7	8	1,2 %	64,9 %
8	7	1,0 %	66,0 %
9	4	0,6 %	66,6 %
10	8	1,2 %	67,8 %
11	6	0,9 %	68,7 %
12	5	0,7 %	69,4 %
13	4	0,6 %	70,0 %
14	5	0,7 %	70,7 %
15	15	2,2 %	73,0 %
16	7	1,0 %	74,0 %
17	6	0,9 %	74,9 %
18	75	11,2 %	86,1 %
19	23	3,4 %	89,6 %
20	7	1,0 %	90,6 %
21	9	1,3 %	91,9 %
22	10	1,5 %	93,4 %
23	11	1,6 %	95,1 %
24	10	1,5 %	96,6 %
25	5	0,7 %	97,3 %
26	1	0,1 %	97,5 %
27	7	1,0 %	98,5 %
28	3	0,4 %	99,0 %
29	4	0,6 %	99,6 %
30	3	0,4 %	100,0 %

Today two thousand players encountered once again how fragile our whole server setup sometimes is and how an unlikely chain of events can cause major issues. In this talk I want to shed some light on how the chain started moving.

Start of the journey: The chat user list

We are currently investigating CPU load issues in the client which we could track down to updates of the chat user list in #aeolus. If you open the chat tab you see a partial list of users, as not the whole list fits to the screen.
We are using a ListView component from our UI framework for this. Each row or ListItem (a user or a group name) is one element in this list view. However, it would be very memory hungry, if the application would render each chat user's list item (~2000 on peak times) if you can only see a few dozen of them.
Therefore the list view component only holds a pool of list items that you can actually see and re-uses / redraws / repopulates them as the list changes.
When profiling the application I could observe hundreds of thousands of updates to the list over a period of 10-15 minutes with about 2.000 users logged in to the chat. Something was causing massive changes to the user list and we couldn't find a reason.

Mass changes out of nowhere

On a different topic we noticed an increasing number of errors when trying to login to the IRC on peak times for no obvious reason as well. Sometimes it took multiple minutes to login.

But then somebody using a regular IRC client looked into the logs and found an interesting thing: a lot of people were logging in and out in a very short period with the quit message "Max SendQ exceeded". A little bit of googling revealed, that this error message was thrown, when the IRC server sends data to the client, and the client doesn't load it fast enough.

Using the incredibly long chat log history of our moderators we were able to track down these errors to their first occurences to October 2019 when we roughly breached 1900 users online at once. Since then FAF has been growing (up to 2200 users online at peak) and so grew the problem as well.

So there is a coincidence between the SendQ exceeded error and the amount of relogin/logouts. Now we tried to connect the dots:

• Whenever you join a channel you receive the list of users in this channel.
• If this list goes beyond a certain size the error pops up.
• The error caused lots of logins/logouts.
• Each of these events caused the chat user list to update multiple times.

So the idea was: If we could solve the IRC error, we might solve / reduce the users CPU load. A potential solution was to increase the buffer size before the server sends the error message.

The IRC restart of Doom

The situation was perfect: 2000 users online. A configuration change. All users would automatically reconnect. We could live-test if the change would make the server go away or persist.

So we flipped the switch and restarted the IRC server.

We could observe the IRC numbers rising up from 0 to 1400 and then it drastically stopped. 600 users lost. What happened?

We expected the IRC reconnect to be simple and smooth. But when did anything ever went smooth? A look into the server console showed all cores at 100% load, most utilization by the API and our MySQL database. WTF happened?

The cache that cached too late

The FAF client has a few bad habits. One of them is, that it downloads information about all clans of all people online in the chat. This is a simplified approach to reduce some complexity.

Since we only have a few dozen active clans, that would only be a few dozen simple calls which would/should be in cache already. Or so we thought.

As it turns out, the caching didn't work as intended. The idea behind the caching is the following: You want to lookup a clan XYZ. First you look into the cache, and if you don't find it here, you ask our API. Asking the API does take a few dozen milliseconds.
But what happens, if you have 10 players from the same clan? You should look it up in the cache, and if you don't find it there, you would query it once, right? Well that's what we expected. But since the first API lookup wasn't finished when looking up the clan for 2nd to 10th time, each of these lookups would also ask the API.

Now imagine 2000 users querying the clans for every player with a clan tag (~200?). Boom. Our API and our database are not meant to handle such workloads. It didn't crash, but it slowed down. And it took so much CPU while doing this, that there wasn't much CPU left for the other services. It took the server roundabout 20 minutes to serve all requests and go back to normal.

Once we spotted that bug, it was an easy fix. As it turns out we just needed a sync=true to particular cases. Problem solved. Why oh why is this not the default? Well, as it turns out this option was added in a later version of our Spring framework and due to backwards compatibility it will always be an opt-in option. Ouchy.

Lessons learned

We saw it again: IRC sucks (well we all knew that before right?). But it seems like the IRC configuration change fixed the SendQ exceeded error. Yay, we actually might reduce the CPU usage for our players.
Also we now know that synchronized caching should be the default, at least in the FAF client
Unfortunately it was revealed again that the FAF api can't handle ultra-high workloads. Unfortunately limiting the amount of available CPUs in Docker does not work in out setup. Further solutions need to be evaluated (e.g. circuit breakers).

Recap and next steps

So now we know that restarting the IRC server can be a dangerous thing. So would I do it again? Hell yes. I know it sucks for the playerbase if the server is having massive lags due to running into CPU limit. But today we learned so much about what our software architecture is capable and where we have weaknesses.

We can use this to improve it. And we need to. FAF is growing more than I've ever expected. In the last 12 months our average-online-playerbase grew by ~300 users with the latest peak being 2200 users. When we moved to the new server beginning of the year I thought that our new server can handle around 3000 users, but as it turns out there is more to do.

I locked this topic (not moderators), because the user @Hashbrowns69 is a fake account that was just created today in order to perform some trolling.

However to people reading this.

I'd like to remind you that we are all working on our free time here. I have a full time job, a little son, a server to run and an association to setup.

Yes, I did not actively stop this nonsense (question is if I could), but I would like to remind you that apart from some drama nothing really happened now.

The server is running, the client receives updates, tournaments are still happening. Every organisation can have issues and yes this time it went public. That's sad but we're also all human.

FAF won't die just because there is some drama going on. There has been drama in the past, you just didn't notice.

Many of you won't remember it, but the amount of posts in this forum and the feedback we collected showed us: the onboarding process along with the registration page is a horror for new users (especially non-english native speakers).

Together with our fellow community member Terrorblade, who is a working expert on customer journeys, we worked out weaknesses in the current process and ways to fix them.

Here are few things we are doing horribly wrong:

• The website promotes the client download. But that is not the start of the journey. If you download and install the client as first step, you then figure out that you need to go back to the website to register and steam link first. In worst case you go Website landing page -> Client -> Website registration -> Client -> Website steam linking -> Client
• The website is only available in english
• The information is unstructured and not really offering much help where you need it
• Errors in the process don't give the user any usefull help (e.g. technical api errors are printed in plain text)
• Field validation is not always available (e.g. is the username already taken? You only find out after you click the registration button)
• Hidden steps (you can only Steam link after you logged in!)

Due to the Steam link process and the required client download the FAF onboarding process is much more complicated than the that of other websites. We even modelled a perfect workflow, but that's beyond the scope of the current work. Nevertheless for the brave peopel here I'd like to share it with you, without further explanation:

In the last weeks I had the opportunity in my job to learn frontend development with Angular (and yet more trainings are to come). In order to train my newly gathered skills, I gave it a try. Unfortunately what I still don't have are skills for designing shit with CSS and colors.

All screenshots are representing work in progress:

Failed registration: As long as you didn't fix all issues and selected all checkboxes you can't click the button. The user lookup is done with a 1 second delay

You can dynamically switch the language. Currently I'm only populating english and german. The biggest need however would be russian.

Once you successfully registered we now (and only then) tell you, that you need to click on the email link:

Nevertheless, users are capable of switching between the steps to see whats ahead and what to wait for:

But using the activation url it looks simpler:

So after a successfull activation we can move on:

The Steam linking page needs some more info why this is required I guess:

The steam login itself is not interesting here, so I skip it. After a successfull login we get this:

And the FAF CLient Setup page is yet missing content completely. Not sure if we want to add screenshot per language, that sounds a bit too much work...

So far I have only shown the "happy path". The most important pain point for users is when the Steam linking doesn't work. We need to be able to distinguish between "You don't own the game" and "Your profile seems to be not public", but this needs some API changes as well.

I hope this change will reduce the amount of people we loose on the way to FAF. But it's still a long way and it might need much more time invested. So far I spent around 20 hours to reach this state (yet I'm facing many beginner problems as this is my first bigger Angular project, so it's a lot of basic learning time included).

Maybe I'll do some more Twitch streams and now the 5 people who saw my last (and first) stream know what they actually saw

Please share ideas and feedback guys!

Yesterday I released the magical 1.0 release of the faf-moderator-client (mostly called "Mordor"). This is a remarkable milestone for me, as I reserved the 1.0 release for the feature complete version which I now believe to have achieved.

Thus it's time to take a break and recap the history of my first and biggest "standalone" contribution to FAF.

When I joined FAF development in 2017 (over 5 years ago) there was a lot of regular manual work in the background. Most of this revolved around uploading avatars, banning players, maps & mods. It put a lot of unnecessary work on the shoulders of the 4 admins we were back then (dukeluke, Downlord, I and in urgent cases also sheeo). Some of the stuff was wrapped in shell scripts and similar stuff to ease it out. Yet, every change required a person to login to the server and run these scripts.

Also in 2017 we introduced the re-invented API which moved from Python to Java and introduced a framework that allowed us to develop more features much much faster. Now we had an easy to read, edit or create things like bans, avatars and such. But we had no user interface for it.

So I started this as a complete new application on my own around mid 2017. Of course I still got advise from my good friend Downlord. And of course I copied a lot of code from other places such as the java client. But still this was the first application I ever wrote that was going to be beyond a certain complexity, actually useful and used by other people!

In Autumn 2017 things escalated to a dramatic level. A renegade group of players was banned for cheating and began destroying as many open lobbies and games as they could as an act of revenge by exploiting bugs. To this end, hundreds of new accounts were created daily.

Enter Mordor. Like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings told, so acted the moderator client: "A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to." Actually I like the quote so much that I named the first release gandalf and later on started naming major releases after movie/TV references or other funny names if nothing better came up.

With little effort, our moderators were suddenly able to block newly created accounts independently and within minutes, putting an end to the obnoxious activities of the exploiters.

Over the time more and more features and some were contributed by other developers. Still essentially it was "my" project were I was making decisions and carried the responsibility and it felt good.

So what is left after these 5 years?

• Is the code high quality and following best practices?
  No. It's just good enough that it barely works.

• Is it well tested with automated test frameworks and setting the bar for future projects?
  Totally not. That thing has exactly one test and that checks if the application can launch.

• Would I do it the same way with the knowledge of today?
  Not for all money in the world. Back then many people disliked the fact that I wrote a java based desktop application and recommended a web based approach and they were right back then (and even more 5 years later). But still I do believe that it was the right choice for me personally as the one who invested all that time. Simply because Java was a language I was familiar enough to get it started and enough help and references to get it working. If I had chosen to learn all the web related stuff, I probably would have been stuck at some point and lost interest. Also I wouldn't have learned all the painful issues when writing desktop applications.
  So even though I usually frown upon web developing, today I understand why things are the way they are and have a much better understanding of the problems that they solve (better).

• Maybe at some point in the future I will restart and do all the things in a web application. Just to get the same learning effect I had with mordor.
  I truly believe that you don't become a good software engineer by reading books and articles about best practices. My experience so far tells me you have to get your hands dirty, work against some of the recommendations, make mistakes and fail so that you see why the best practices are the way they are, how they can help and when you should blatantly ignore them.

• And now, for the ones who are still reading (wow, you really must be super bored!), here were the release names/themes:

  • 0.1 Gandalf:
    “A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.”
  • 0.2 Dr. Jan Itor:
    "You will not ruin my Christmas. Not again. Not this year"
    This close-to-christmas release was a reference to my favourite TV show Scrubs.
  • 0.3 Chinese Democracy
    This release allowed creating votes for FAF
  • 0.4 Jeremy's farewell
    Obsoleted Softlys eye-cancer-coloured avatar management app
  • 0.5 Police Academy
    The release made the content of the client tutorial tab editable
  • 0.6 Paper War
    A reference to the new moderation-report feature
  • 0.7 Modzarella
    "Because mods modding mods is cheesy."
    Added features for mods to manage the mod vault
  • 0.8 Checks and balances
    Implementation of the permission system splitting off the power from the allmighty moderators
  • 0.9 Maximum Break
    We added managing map pools. A reference to all the Snooker fans out there.
  • 0.10 Secret Empire
    The only release name not chosen by me but by Sheikah instead. We migrated to our new OAuth service called Ory Hydra. A reference for all Marvel fans. I didn't get it, but I think he still nailed it.
  • 1.0 Avengers: Endgame
    We hit the end of the road. Nobody is going to revive good old Tony (no, I actually didn't watch a single Marvel movie...)

Last fun fact: The 1.0 release seems to contain a critical bug, so there will be at least a 1.0.1

The system can't determine the path to your user directory, instead it just shows "??????".
You probably have unsupported characters in your windows username

I just finished Thief (2014). Probably Tomb Raider (2013) next. FIFA also works great.

My Steam Deck is not intended to be used for RTS @Sheikah .

The FAF ownership policy has nothing to do with the situation in Russia. It's been discussed plenty of times before and we're not going to remove it.
However we surely will not make an exception there if you mean this by "coming back to their senses".

I started working on it a while ago but lacked some input on legal license texts and eventually paused https://github.com/FAForever/db/pull/297

No plans, but interesting suggestion.
Could cause issues for people playing on different devices though.

There is a patch from Sheikah waiting for review.
It'll take another week or two until it gets deployed I'd assume

That's mostly because we never used XMPP for chat but always IRC

So FAF developers should spent time to allow other people to avoid FAF?

Fabulous. Are they full plastic or are they "empty" on the inside?