(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!

It's quite some time since my last blog post and therefore I want to give you a little update on what has happened since then.

A lot of issues cascaded and blocked each other, so in many terms it didn't really feel like much progress, because nothing got really finished. But the story behind it might be interesting for you nevertheless.

So here comes the probably longest issue and failure compilation of FAF we ever had (and it's just the stuff I remember)

Travis CI terminating services
Travis CI is a "continuous integration" platform that we use in almost every Github repository to run automated tests and to build releases.

Unfortunately it looks like Travis CI is in financial trouble and they massively reduced the capacities for open source projects. Out of a sudden almost every repository needed to wait half a day or longer for a single test run or building a release, and in many cases even those failed.

As a solution we migrated most of the core repositories to Github Actions, which is not only faster but nicer to use in many cases. But depending on the CI pipeline complexity that was an effort of multiple evenings until everything was sorted out.

There are still repositories waiting to be migrated

GoLive of the matchmaker
So shortly before Christmas we reached the final phase of the matchmaker. In the hurry a few points were overlooked which caused some troubles:

1. On releasing the public beta client release, we sort of derped on the version number. It doesn't follow the required version pattern. This leads to every user on this release will never ever again receive an update notification. Please update manually to the latest client release.
2. Replay ratings: Since the dawn of time, FAF had always just 1 rating per game, because it was either Global Rating or Ladder Rating or no rating at all. Additionally global and ladder rating summaries were stored in 2 different tables.
   However having 1 table per leaderboard is not a healthy strategy if you plan to have many more of them. Long time before TMM we already moved to dynamic leaderboard based rating. Effectively this allows us to calculate more than one rating per game, but 1 rating per leaderboard per game (if we need to). Until the rollout of TMM the old tables were still populated though. This stopped with the rollout, effectively breaking the rating changes show in the replay view on the client.
   Also the API endpoints for fetching the correct replays where still missing and added on short notice.
3. The official TMM client version also had issues on showing the right rating for the in game players. This led to maximum confusion whether the whole system worked and if ratings where actually accurately calculated. Eventually I'd say it was all correct, just the display was wrong.
4. The replay vault search by rating was removed due to a misunderstanding between Sheikah and me. Things got complicated here as well: now you don't have the one rating to search for, but you have to select from which leaderboard you want to look at the ratings.
5. Instead of looking into each leaderboard with multiple queries we tried to add the current leaderboard ratings for each player into the player object on API level.
   Unfortunately this creates a suboptimal query that maximized MySQL cpu usage within minutes. This lead to a few server crashes until we figured out what had happened.

Moving to MariaDB
The MySQL issue showed us once again that we want to move to a new database version. The current MySQL 5.7 is quite old.
This discussion is not new, actually it's already almost 2 years old but got deferred because there was no real pressure (and we couldn't really agree whether to go to MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.x which are both compatible with MySQL 5.7 but incompatible with each other).

The server downtime caused by the suboptimal query as described above made me reconsider. We had multiple issues with MySQLs shitty way of doing a specific type of join (nested loops). So we tested this with MySQL 8 and MariaDB 10.5 on a copy of the production database.

There was a simple query that took 1min 25s (utilising the whole PC). MySQL 8 took just 5 seconds less. But MariaDB obviously fixed the underlying issues and returned a result in 1 second.

So this set the new path to migrate to MariaDB. A test migration from raw MySQL 5.7 without backup and restore ended up in a corrupted data set. So we'll need to to proper backup and restore.

Unfortunately MariaDB tripped over one of the migration files when creating the current database scheme. Therefore I tried to merge all migrations into a single database schema import (which took a few days to figure out).

Once this was done I still encountered the error with a better description just to figure out that this was due to a bug in MariaDB that was marked as fixed already but no release yet! So it had to be postponed once again...

It's finally released by now, and we'll need to restart some testing. This is probably part of the next server update.

Auto-Backups killed the server
Our new server uses ZFS as file system which is very modern and powerfull. When we setup the server we thought using ZFS for the Docker (the container daemon running all apps) container volumes was a good idea. It wasn't, instead it was polluting the system with ZFS datasets for each docker container layer (there were HUNDREDS of them). Even though this caused no direct harm, it prevented us from activating auto-backups.

With the last server update we fixed this and are now back to a proper dataset list:

NAME            USED  AVAIL     REFER  MOUNTPOINT
tank            888G  34.4G     3.93G  legacy
tank/docker    32.7G  34.4G     29.1G  -
tank/fafstack   160G  34.4G      158G  legacy
tank/mongodb    353M  34.4G      277M  legacy
tank/mysql     13.5G  34.4G     12.4G  legacy
tank/replays    677G  34.4G      677G  legacy

And then we thought activating auto-backup was a good idea. But it was not. Even though using snapshots should only consume the "delta" between the current and the previous state on disk MySQL alone took ~20GB for 5 snapshots. This brought the server disk into critical area, where it started mounting parts of the file system as read only.

The solution was to remove the backup snapshots and restart the server and work on the next topic:

Replay recompression
When we rented the new server in January 2020 we were thinking about how much disk space we need and what the additional cost for more storage would be. Back then we came to the conclusion that 1 TB would suffice, and once we run into problems we'd optimize the replays stored on the disk.

The replay format dates back into ancient times, where some weird decisions were made. A replay file contains of 1 lines of JSON describing the content of the replay. After the line break there is a base64 encoded deflate-compressed.

The deflate compression algorithm is ancient and very inefficient compared to modern algorithms.
Base64 encoding is a way to force any kind of binary data into a representation of the ASCII character set. This might have made sense 2013 for download compatibility, but I highly doubt it. The massive disadvantage is, that base64 encoding brings an overhead of around 30%.

Improving this replay format is a topic again, that is well known and older than 2 years and always scheduled for "can be done when needed". Even though there were code changes lying around for the replay server and the java client.

The new plan is instead of zip + base64 we will compress the replay stream with the Zstandard algorithm developed by Facebook (the best compression algorithm around).

Actually the latest client release 1.4.1 added support for the new replay format, as we already saw the server disk going full (but we expected to have more time).

With the server crash due to disk space we reprioritized this issue. Now with the client release out we prepared a script to re-compress all existing replays to Zstandard (currently I'm doing some last backups, but I intend to start it tommorow).
With test excerpts we could see a reduction of 40% disk space. This will free up at least 200GB on the server, making room for another 2-4 years of new replays.

Current estimation say it will take 10 days if we run it without parallelization.

The OAuth cascade of Doom
In my last blog I presented a new registration page. Unfortunately when trying to finish it I hit a wall on login to our API. It took me over 2 months to figure out the whole complexity of the problem.

When we started work on the FAF API we selected OAuth2 as a standardized, mature and safe protocol for login to the web. And that is sort of still the case. Then we build a whole authorisation server into our API that takes care of the whole set of login flows. Currently we use 2 of these: If you login via the website or the forum, you get redirected to an API login page and after login redirected back. This is called the "implicit flow". The java client however uses a classic username and password approach. This is known as the "password flow".

Following standards and using well known frameworks I expected to be able to connect to the API from my registration app very easily. But it didn't work out. Today I know: This is related to the fact that the concrete OAuth2 implementation we use is customized in a non-standard way (which I never even was aware of). There is a better way of doing it now, with a new standard on top of OAuth2 called OpenID Connect.

Unfortunately our API library is deprecated and it's successor dropped support for the authorization server alltogether. Therefore a replacement was needed eventually.

I was looking into the space of cloud offerings if there are any free services that could work out for FAF. But as it turns out FAF is huuuge with it's 250.000+ playerbase. Running this as a service in the cloud would cost us hundreds, maybe thousands of Euros per month. (Currently we spend just ~80€ on the prod server total cost)

So we needed something self hosted. 2 candidates were evaluated: RedHat Keycloak and Ory Hydra.

RedHat Keycloak is the more mature product so I evaluated this first. After a week of experiments, it turned out to be completely unsuitable for FAF as it is built for enterprise where you e.g. need to give your firstname and lastname and can't select a username (or even change it).

Ory Hydra on the other hand is just one tool that does OAuth2 flows and nothing else and needs to be combined with your own software. So I wrote a new one with a new fancy login and everything (that's a whole story on its own) and after 2 months and a shitton of failures mostly related to fighting http vs https in an internal network I was capable to login to the test server.

But then I was stuck because the API needs to support the old way of login and the new way of login, as the tokens look different and the cryptographical signatures are different etc.. So I wrote a compatibility layer to support both.

But now we're stuck again. Ory Hydra takes security very seriously. And due to that they refuse to implement deprecated legac OAuth flows such as "password flow", which the FAF client uses...
So we need to implement a web-based login. But there is no library support out there because the open source world has moved away from desktop applications a long time ago.

So in theory we need to build a web-based login using a WebView and catch the responses to get the access tokens generated there. But on the other side we still need to login the classic way because the server still uses the old username/password to check the login itself... there are plans and suggested code changes to fix that as well but..

Summary: It's all incompatible with each other and a transitional approach seems almost impossible. We'd need a big-bang golive deprecating all older clients with the risk of nobody being able to login to FAF for quite some time.

This is hell and there is no easy way out, but there is no alternative in the long run. And we can't just wait for the next explosion to pressure us

You want to contribute to FAF but you're unsure? You think you lack the skills? Well then read on, todays blog is for you! Even though it's a story about developers, it applies to all contributors! (Also watch my YouTube tutorial on how to start contributing).

I want to tell you 2 independent stories about 2 very different developers:

---

Story 1

I once met a Java developer at a party in his late twenties who was working in a software consultancy for a few years. From a trustworthy source I knew he was quite talented and he was very unhappy about his salary. Back then my company was looking for developers, so I approached him and asked him about his skills. So he was doing mostly Java frontend (ugh, not so modern) and regular backend stuff. I told him that my company was hiring. Of course he was interested, so I handed in his application.

I met him again before the interview and talked to him. I said "Dude, I saw in your application that you have no experience in software development in the cloud with Kubernetes and Docker and all the fancy shit. I have this open source project called FAForever. I could show it to you and explain you a lot of stuff before the interview." He declined and I asked why. "Well, I spend so much time at work, I don't want to drag it into my own personal life, but of course I will say I'm eager to learn it on the job." He was not hired.

Why am I sharing this story? First of all, I'm not criticizing here. It's an absolute fair point to strictly separate your personal life from your work life. I'm sharing this story because it shows, that not every developer has the same mindset about learning in his free time. It's also obvious that it's not the skillset alone that makes a developer suitable for FAF.

---

Story 2

Let's take another example. A few years ago there was a dude lurking in the FAF Slack offering help. He knew FAF for quite some time as a player, but recently stumbled over the open source project. He had a vision of bringing back Galactic War, but he had only basic programming experience. But was experienced in database queries as he was working as a consultant for ERP systems. He offered some help on administrative tasks on the server, e.g. running manualy queries (a lot of work was done directly in the database back then), helping on patch days or keeping an eye on the less-important software like the website.

Over time he gained more and more responsibilities and even started more and more on development. But man, did he fuck up things. One day he wanted to backup the website before an upgrade and gzipped all files, not knowing that the gzip command deletes the files afterwards, which resulted in afew hours downtime of the website. Or when he tried to fix some server permissions and locked out the MySQL database from its own files. But he learned. And read docs. And improved stuff. Step by step. He didn't do it all on his own of course. He was mentored by one of the reigning DevOps councilors back then.

After hundreds of hours spent on writing code and scripts, analyzing bugs, dockerizing aps, migrating servers, building/replacing/configuring software he became well sufficient with the way of software development, that he applied for a software developer job. Even though he had no commercial track record, his knowledge on software development and the cloud related technologies (e.g. Docker) was good enough, that he got the job anyway. In the same year, the dude became DevOps councilor. Some of you might have figured it out already: That guy is me. Hello!

So why am I sharing "my FAF life story" with you? Because I wanna show off? Well... maybe a little bit But moooore important in my opinion there are some key learnings that I want to share with you:

• It's not the skillset, that qualifies you for FAF, it's your dedication and your will to improve. (Even though an existing skillset helps of course!)
• You don't need to have learned or studied programming to have an impact on FAF. You don't even need to start with development.
• Mentorship helps. I didn't really learn software development anywhere, besides FAF. And I learned it because when I joined, we had a very fixed focus on quality and Downlord was an unrelenting mentor, who only accepted high quality submissions.
• I didn't learn this in a few weeks by reading a book or watching YouTube tutorials. It was a demanding process and took hundreds, maybe thousands of hours. And as you can imagine, no expert has that amount of time so large parts of this way you need learn on your own. People can give you advise, but eventually you need to solve the problem you want to solve.
• Learning doesn't go without failure. I did some stupid shit back then that I'm not proud about. But I learned from all of these lessons, and after each fuckup I sat down and thought about, how to prevent this error from happening again.

I hope you didn't get the impression that you need to spend hundreds of hours to get into FAF. You don't need to, if you want to contribute in one area. And nobody expects you to.

The most important thing is, that you have fun. I have seen many people leave because they lost fun by overacting. For me it was worth it and it was fun to spend the amount of time. Since I have a kid I have to make more and more cuts in my FAF time. That's also one of the reasons why I am trying to motivate you to become the next generation of FAF developers. The one day will come when I want to pass the baton.

---

Small sidenote:
Some people claim that FAF is just a playground for developers, so that they have some cool technology to play with for their resume, while breaking important features for the playerbase. While I can't deny that we use our result for resumes (well I wouldn't have gotten job without it), I can assure you, that we do no play around in terms of "resume driven development".

Well we had the same problem with Github downloads which has a worldwide CDN, so I'm still not sure if CDN can actually fix it.
So apart from just throwing money at some company, how would we measure that we actually improved the situation?

@dontstealecorock said in Client v1.6.0:

I think u can try better. I dont mind if you will be rude(actually your last post is toxic so whats the difference) There should be a reason for switch to non blocking approach so just write it. Maybe u can share perfomance numbers. How many memory blocking code was consuming per call?

Ok, so here you go:
You take the time to spit out unqualified critics on a topic by reading a short summary of the changes obviously without a) even have the slightest understanding what reactive is about or b) how it affects the client architecture overall. Furthermore if you would have reviewed the changes you would have spotted that this change goes beyond just introducing reactive patterns.

Less memory consumption due to less threads is one of many benefits, but it is not the main driver behind moving to reactive patterns.

I will not argue that in general replacing classic synchronous blocking code with reactive code is increasing the code complexity. I have seen it. I work with it every day. And in some cases it's worth it and in others it's not and I would not introduce it without good arguments.

But that "reactive is complex"-bashing you do here doesn't apply at all, because the client already tries to be asynchronous by applying the crappy Java 8 CompletableFuture logic everywhere it touches API calls. This code was already pretty ugly and complex to understand and using Project Reactor actually can make the code more consistent and easier to read. It also allows additional improvements such as better unit test supports and better handling and mixing of separate async operations than the Java 8 library can.

Furthermore the client by itself is per definition already forced to run stuff in background thread and schedule it elsewhere because it has a GUI with a main thread and we need to be particularly cautious not to ever block this thread. Therefore reactive programming actually is a good match for UI programming which is the reason why web frameworks such as React and Angular was ahead of the Java ecosystem years before (well apart from the fact that JavaScript only allows one thread they needed a better solution).

Looking at actual lobby-server tcp connection: reactive programming here allows us to move away from a constantly polling io thread which eats a lot of CPU waiting (RAM is almost completely irrelevant here). But again this refactoring brought along some other changes and Sheikah can't mention them all along.
We split off the lobby protocol into a dedicated module and wrote it in Kotlin which results in much fewer code. We now have protocol mesage classes with correct null/not-null annotations which makes it easier for future developers to work with it. We tried to decouple the lobby protocol from the client state so we can adapt to protocol changes more easily also enhancing the overall architecture.

Soo essentially we did these changes for different kind of reasons.
You cannot know these reasons. That's completely fine. You can ask for it though and we'd be glad to explain them within our time constraints.
But just picking one argument and bashing on it is just buzzword trolling.

@sheikah said in What should be done to address FAF patch download issues?:

The caching is only useful if you go back and watch old replays. For most players this is never any issue. The download happens when a patch is released and then it is over.

It is a much bigger issue to consume all the memory with the cached files as people may have limited space on their C: drives.

I thought we added a file (size) limit and that it is on by default. We should really do that as it seems stable.

@dontstealecorock said in Client v1.6.0:

Sounds like you higly increased code complexity in return for nothing. JVM allocates 1mb per thread. How many parallel blocking request client does? I assume that number is not big. You can even reduce memory per thread using jvm option. 512kb most likely is enough.

I literally cannot answer this seriously without getting sarcastic and rude, so I will not comment on this any further.

There is no way to break it down into files any further, so that would be guesswork.

Yet again waiting 30 minutes is not acceptable? How did I survive the 00s with only ISDN (64kb/s max) and paying per minute? A 5mb patch took 1.5 hours and cost me around 2€.

The math game:
Our server has a bandwith of 1Gbit/s = 125mb/s. This is a theoretical optimum. With tcp/http overhead and other services still running we might be able to provide 80mb/s for downloading patches.

That means 8 players can download a patch at 10mb/s in parallel. Or 80 players can download a patch in parallel at 1mb/s. Unfortunately there is 1500+ players who want to download that. Of course not exactly all at the same time, but you get the problem.

The server network speed is one potential limitation.
This doesn't explain why this particularly affects players outside of the EU. Maybe there are other effects taking place which outside of FAFs control.

We have a similar situation with client downloads. I offloaded these to a private webspace mirror a long time ago which improved the situation for some users and not for others.

Load balancing and CDN:
So why not just put more servers up containing the files?
Well it doesn't just work. Putting in a mirror server with the same files doesn't make it automatically download from it. You need a load balancer in front. Also then you have some backup server capabilities that are not used 99% of the year. So you want to provision a super small one. But still you have to keep the files in sync with the main server, the operating systems regularly updated yadadada. Also doesn't solve conflicts due to the region.

The "enterprise" solution: content delivery networks. Have big companies such as Google, Amazon (AWS) or Cloudflare cache your files in multiple regions and distribute it their.
That is guaranteed to work. But also not a thing we are experienced with at all (this has nothing to do with running server or developing software anymore). So if I look out Cloudflare claims you get it very cheap while Google or Amazon price calculators say it's about 90-400$ a month depending on a lot of variables. I barely believe that Cloudflare can offer it so cheap, so the cheap offers must have caveats we are not aware about. The whole topic is very complex and very intransparent and nothing you just enable you with just a button click (even though providers like Cloudflare try to make this impression).

Fact is we have traffic of 15-20TB a month and traffic just costs money, it can't be free without major pitfalls.

The patch bloat:
Each patch is roundabout 50mb to download.
Do you want to know what the average binary change of a patch is? It's roundabout 100kb.
I know this because from 2017-2019 I spent a 100-150 hours trying to build a better patch system. I actually have a working one, but it went into crazy complexity and exchanged the download speed for speed in applying a patch. I did not take into account that 30%+ of our playerbase runs FAF on 10-15 year old notebooks with the power of a toaster.

There were many discussions about other ways of doing it. But creating game patches in FAF is super complicated consisting of source code from git repository paired with binary files and different setups for different featured mods. Basically it's hell and touching it will most probably break other parts of FAF (especially backwards replay compatibility).

So the "correct" solution would be a proper patching mechanism, bringing down patch size to justifiable levels (maybe 1-5mb with decent patching speed or similar...)

Summary

So overall speaking it is a very complex topic on a problem that occurs a) only to subset of the playerbase and b) only on rare occurrences (game patches, partially client updates) and c) it can be solved by the user showing patience and/or trying again at a later time.
Furthermore d) the problem is as old as FAF and doesn't break anything.

My personal opinion on that matter is: FAF has other issues and topics that have a higher priority. Not all of them are [intended to be] known to the public.

We can try to apply some of these proclaimed "cheap and easy" solutions, but my common sense super powers tell me they won't work on the scale of FAF and/or will be unreliable or shut down by the service provider because we excessively use it.

We had a server update since March so it should be fixed? But I guess nobody checked

I'd rather like to know why it's possible to repair a super complex ASF in a staging facility but there is no repair station for a simple T1 tank

The Rackover unitdb is sort of "reset" everytime we restart the server and needs a manual trigger to update to the latest patch. Very annoying. I updated it for now.

You just obviously have 2 accounts. Recover the first one with "Reset password via Steam"