Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

I have moved Kilg.us back to referencing the database on the new servers. Once again, things seem to be going well. Hopefully that will still be the case in a couple hours!

I did not attempt to copy over the old database. There is a lot of complexity involved in merging databases and I just didn’t have the patience after yesterday. As a result, if you added or removed players, moved them on or off the bench, or manipulated a team or your account in the last 24 hours, those changes will be lost. You will need to re-apply any changes.

To the couple people that signed up for Kilg.us today–I’m sorry, but you’ll need to do it again! I promise this isn’t a regular occurrence. In fact, I’ve never deleted an account before!

The only outstanding issue that I am aware of from the migration is the appearance of players that are not on the bench. They are rendering as gray and “benched” right now, but the team is still calculating their stats in totals. I’m working on that now and assume it will be a quick fix.

If you notice any other anomalies, please comment here, email me, or post to Facebook or Twitter (@kilgustracker).

**UPDATE 10:40PM**

It appears that batter stats are being collected properly for individuals, but tallied improperly for teams.

It appears that pitcher stats are not being collected properly for individuals, but tallies are correct for teams (based on day-old data).

Still investigating.

**UPDATE 11:19PM**

The culprits seem to be the stored procedures that Kilg.us tries to use for storing stats. All the procedures seem to be failing with the move to the new server. Luckily, Kilg.us included fallback string concatenation mechanisms for exactly this situation. I have disabled all the stored procedure calls and everything now seems to be working.

I’m a little tepid to call the Kilg.us migration a success, but things seem to have worked. The site, blog, databases, scheduled processes, accounts, teams, stats…they’re all moved over. And as best I can tell, they are all working. I’ll be keeping a very close eye on things through the week in case anything goes awry, but we seem to be in good shape for now. If you notice any odd behavior, errors, or encounter problems PLEASE comment here, post to Facebook or Twitter, or send me an email so I can get to the root of things.

Now that the migration is complete, I’ll also finally get to some upgrades! First on the list are some new statistical categories. Please keep in mind that Kilg.us uses a free data source from MLB that only offers limited information. I pull as much out of that source as I can, but some stats just aren’t available. Also on the list is some tweaking to the sign-up/log-in form. I have been receiving quite a few emails about issues with it, most specifically with Internet Explorer 8. If you encounter problem signing-up or logging-in in the meantime, try a browser other than IE8.

Just for fun: Kilg.us now manages over 2300 teams for more than 1300 users! And with the new hosting infrastructure, my testing is showing 3-4 second rendering times for team stat pages compared to 13-23 seconds at the old host. Light speed!

I hope you all continue to enjoy using Kilg.us. Our new hosting should make your stat tracking experience faster and better than ever!

I intended to migrate Kilg.us to its new servers tomorrow, May 3. If all goes well, the limiting factor on how long Kilg.us will be down is the domain transfer. This can take up to 48 hours, but will go through in 1-3 hours for most people. I intend to take Kilg.us off-line as soon as I get home from work tomorrow (~6pm mountain time). With this approach, I expect the migration and any subsequent troubleshooting should be finished tomorrow night.

Please check Facebook and Twitter (@kilgustracker) for updates on the migration.

By now, everyone should have received their daily boxscores. If not, please comment below.

We were not without bumps, unfortunately. That I am aware of so far:

• As many a 50 boxscores were sent out multiple times (apologies!)
• The public SMTP I tried to use apparently uses a 24-hour window (rather than a day) for its quotas

The duplicate boxscores was just a goof by me. Last night as I was running my final tests, I commented-out the line that removes an email from the queue after sending because I didn’t want to keep re-entering data into the system before each test. I forgot to un-comment that line when I was done. Because of that, when the system pulled the first 50 boxscores to send, it still left them in the queue. When it went to pull the next 50, it returned the same group. I noticed this after a few times through the process, so hopefully everyone that got duplicates only saw a trickle–not a deluge–of them.

The SMTP issue is frustrating. In my testing, I was able to generate the full list of emails. I assumed the quota would reset at midnight. Apparently that wasn’t the case. So hundreds last night plus hundreds this morning meant the sending account was locked out mid-process. To resolve this, I used one of my personal accounts to complete the send. Many of you will have seen messages come from “matthew@encoredigitalmedia.com” rather than Kilg.us. I figured this was better than making you miss a day’s boxscore.

I have spent most of the last two days trying to get a dedicated Kilg.us SMTP server up and running so I don’t need to worry about stupid quotas and such. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no experience with setting up SMTP and have had just about zero success–hence the use of a public SMTP to get this moving. If anyone knows SMTP and can offer a helping hand, I would be greatly appreciative! Get in touch by email (admin@kilg.us), comment here, or on Twitter (@kilgustracker) or Facebook.

All that said, I think all emails should have been delivered and I have received feedback from some people whose emails weren’t rendering properly before that they look good now. All in all, I’m going to call this one a draw. I’ll keep plugging away today in hopes of a perfect push tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning Kilg.us will use a entirely new process for generating and sending daily boxscore emails! So let’s all cross our fingers and hope it works…

I have spent all of this week re-designing and re-building how emails are generated, stored, and sent. Suffice to say, the new system is significantly more complex than the old one. When I’ve had a chance to breath and am not so tired, I’ll go into more detail on how it works.

My expectations of the new system are that it will:

• Scale to accommodate as many users/emails as desired (the old system failed in the 200-300 range)
• Allow of future portability if Kilg.us needs to change hosting
• Implement all components to identify HTML vs. Text email so boxscores render properly on all clients
• Allow for side-by-side HTML and Text versions (text version is forthcoming)
• Provide redundancy of data, so if the process fails it can be re-started without losing a day’s data
• Reduce likelihood of Kilg.us mail servers being identified as SPAM and black-listed
• Lower computation overhead

It sounds almost too good to be true! Tomorrow’s push will be the first full run trying to send out to everyone’s unique addresses. All the testing so far has been delivering to a kilg.us address (or small tests to outside domains). I’ll be keeping an eye on things in the morning to try to ensure everything goes smoothly. If you do not receive your normal boxscore in an acceptably legible format, please post comments here with details (DETAILS–without them I can’t do anything–what email client, what team name, what was wrong, screenshots, any little detail).

I’ve been frantically working away on a new email system for Kilg.us the last couple days. The goal is to streamline the process, reduce execution time, reduce likelihood for failure, and improve the quality of the email delivered to your inbox. I’m about 20 hours into the effort, but spent 6 hours going in circles last night…very frustrating. As is often the case, I slept on it and have some new ideas this morning, so I’m again optimistic that I’ll be rolling it out in the coming days. Check back for updates.

In the mean time, a number of people have been reporting that their emails are not being displayed as HTML in their email clients. I haven’t tried to troubleshoot this as I am replacing the system anyway. If you are experiencing this, it wouldn’t hurt to comment with what email client you use (Thunderbird, Outlook, Gmail, iPhone Mail, etc.). We might notice a pattern and be able to share some advice with one another.

As far as I know, emails have gone out properly for three straight days now. If you’re not seeing them, leave a comment, ping me on twitter (@kilgustracker), or shoot me an email (admin@kilg.us).

As many of you experienced, this morning the Kilg.us daily boxscores went horribly wrong and began sending piles of duplicate mails to everyone. If I haven’t apologized to you yet: I’m sorry. I try very hard to make sure any changes I make to Kilg.us won’t have an adverse effect on users. I bungled this one, but at least I think I’ve figured out what happened.

I mentioned previously that I moved the daily boxscore email script to the new Kilg.us server. That is why emails went out to anyone. On the new server PHP is installed differently from the old server. As a result, when I run the CRON job to generate the emails, I needed to use an application to call the script rather than just calling PHP to execute it. I chose to use a program called wget. The idea is that wget makes a call to a URL and that URL (a PHP file) generates and sends the emails. Before scheduling the morning’s emails, I tested to ensure the process worked. When I tested, though, I only used a sub-set of data. I didn’t really need 350 emails coming into my inbox, so I tested with a couple emails each for those sent to a team owner and those sent to a team viewer. That worked great.

When the CRON job ran this morning, everything seemed to go well until duplicates started showing up. A second round, then a third, then a fourth and so on. Interestingly, each wave was 15 minutes apart. As it turns out, if wget can’t complete a request (in this case a VERY long request for 350 emails), it tries again. By default it will try up to 20 times to fetch a file. Because the script takes so long to run, I believe it exceeded the server time-out.  When the script timed out, wget requested it a second time, then a third, then a fourth and so on. I believe this is what caused the duplicate emails.

I’ve made three adjustments to address this. First, I increased the server time-out for this process. Second, I have changed the CRON job to tell wget never to retry the fetch if it fails. Third, I’ve broken the massive emails process into multiple chunks. This is a temporary fix until I convert to using PEAR::Mail to more intelligently manage the process. I’m done for tonight, but that will probably be the priority tomorrow.

So that’s all of today’s work. Six hours sunk, but I think the emails will work in the morning. I’ve pushed back the time that the emails go out by a couple hours to they’ll line up with when I roll out of bed in the morning. If things go off-track, I’ll be able to curtail things faster than today. If all goes well, I’ll move the schedule back to the early morning hour so everyone has the boxscore email when they get up in the morning.

Keep your fingers crossed…

On the positive side, email boxscores finally went out this morning. And based on the number of emails I’ve received, they reached a lot of people! Unfortunately, after the initial batch they continued to send another 6 or 7 times. I believe I have that process stopped.

At first glance, I don’t know why this happened. The script that sends the emails is unchanged from what used to work (just migrated to the new server). That would seem to suggest there was a problem with the CRON job scheduling. I’ve deleted all CRON jobs from the server and will be doing some more research to try to determine what went wrong before I re-schedule the script.

I’m sorry to all of you that were flooded by emails this morning. I’ll do my best to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Things are proceeding well with the migration of Kilg.us to a new host. The cloud server is up, the web server is installed, database server configured, postfix installed, SSH/SFTP running. I’ve even migrated the codebase with success, although it is all still running on the old Kilg.us database. Tomorrow I hope to get the database copied over and see how things work.

For tomorrow I have moved the CRON job that mails daily boxscores to the new server. An initial test of it was successful. I’m optimistic that tomorrow morning everyone that wants boxscore emails should receive them.