Bluff Avenue Blog
Updates and news from the Bluff Avenue trenches.
Bluff Avenue Blog
Updates and news from the Bluff Avenue trenches.
About this Group
- Name:
- Bluff Avenue Support
- Description:
- We're here to lend a helping hand and make your Bluff Avenue experience a pleasant one.
Read our blog to find out about the latest updates and features, and feel free to post to the Support forum or message us any questions, feedback, or bug reports.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/bluffave
You may have noticed lag issues or other game flakiness with the site the last few weeks. It's been a mystery to us, as nothing in our server or network configuration has changed recently, and up till a few weeks ago the site had been running without a hitch for months.
I was starting to suspect it may be the sheer number of games created on the site in the last 6 years. So long as they were active and showing up in a group game lobby, they were loaded in memory. I counted almost 7000 games that were older than 6 months.
So our latest attempt to solve the site performance problems was to delete all games 6 months old or older. If that was indeed the problem, that should probably buy us another 5 years of runway before we run out of memory again. :)
I haven't logged into the site in a few weeks, and only today found out the game server's been on the fritz for weeks (judging from messages in my inbox and forum posts). Of course this coincided with the email system deciding to stop delivering message notifications, so of course all those messages people sent me about the server went unread. :\
Well, I rebooted the server, and things seem to be working now. Terribly sorry for the inconvenience!
Long time no post. :) I know most of you have probably figured this out, but just for the sake of new users, I wanted to clarify the current state of Bluff Avenue.
We created this site in 2009 as a way of playing an "online home game"--an experience that no existing online poker site offered at the time. It was as much for our own enjoyment as for the challenge of creating it, and for the possibility of making something bigger out of it.
The site was only funded out of my savings, so out of the need to pay bills and eat food, I got a job in November of 2009 and sadly left Bluff Ave to fend for itself. I haven't done any serious coding on the site since then, and maintenance has been limited to Dan and I occasionally restarting the game server when something gets horked.
So that's the current state of the site, and what I imagine is the future of the site. We'll keep it running, just because it seems like such a waste to take it down, but I don't anticipate any new feature development or bug fixes happening unless I win the lottery. :) Sorry about that.
We do read our messages though, so feel free to message us if something's wrong with the game server--we don't check in daily, so we won't know there's something wrong unless you let us know.
Until then, enjoy!
Usually, I just wait until it's late at night and nobody's on the site in order to do maintenance, but lately it seems like there's at least one game going on even late at night...So here's your advance warning!
We're coming down Sunday night (Monday morning) at 1:00 AM Pacific Time. The server seems laggy, I'm going to kick it a couple of times. Hopefully that doesn't break anything. :)
Sorry about the outage yesterday. Technical difficulties, combined with a server migration. All should be well now.
Wow! what a differnce your fix made! Thanks Kevin!
it's really awesome to see the site up and running again, and more importantly the root cause discovered :) Great to know. Kevin :)
server down?
Thanks for your hard work on this site, kevin!
Pls update the game to html 5
Flash player is unsafe
Hello thank you for this site it's amazing I use it to play with friends around the world. Bonus that it Dosent have any rake so you can keep track accurately.
Quick question tho!
Is this site made to create action or is it purely random?
We find this site game is pretty fair but there's always that question if online play creates more action or is it purely variance from the amount of hands that can be played?
It's purely random. I assure you it would be a lot more work to write a dealing algorithm intended to produce more action than it is to simply randomly shuffle a deck of cards, and to be honest I don't even think building something like that would be particularly fun or interesting (which were the main reasons I built this site).
whats up with the web? games cant be searched at all
Kevin, can you maybe do another deletion of old games? Been having some lag.
Thanks
We cannot get table talk to work anylonger.
server down?
Can't see games any more in my group. Is there a server issue?
Hey Kevin, can you please delete the games that are at least 6 months old. Thank you! My friends and I greatly appreciate the time and money that you spent for Bluffave. Again, thank you for doing this.
Our game seemed to be deleted while we were playing and then when we tried to create a game it said, "504 Gateway Time-Out The server didn't respond in time"