Waffles.ch: News

[ALAN30]

From a Waffles Developer:

Hi, waffles dev here. In the interests of transparency, here's what's going on, on a more technical-side of things.

As you all know, waffles has had financial issues. Currently we're moving hosts, and yes, those BTCs coming out are payments for new hosting. The page you see being served right now is coming from the new server.

Unlike other new trackers, waffles has a couple of issues that's unique to us. First is that we're technically downsizing in order to save costs, and this means we have to deal with existing loads and users. Even right now, plenty of people are hitting our server purely from tracker announce hits, and the performance requirement for that is enormous. It's mainly compounded by fact that we only allow https connections for everything; nothing's sent over plain text. Of course we can fix it by adding more hardware... but as mentioned, financial issues. Old servers were already maxing out, so downsizing hurts.

Second and probably more important is our accrued technical debt. We've simply never had the dev and sysop power to do timely migrations, and that includes the code. A lot of it has been done as pretty terrible patch jobs, and this is causing delays in moving stuff over. Much of it was once written to be purely on the old servers and nowhere else. Gazelle codebase is terrible, but admittably, waffles code currently is worse. We have a surprising amount of backend software that isn't just a bunch of old PHP scripts; would have been a lot easier if it were!

Good news is that I'm working on it. It'll happen eventually. Server's hardware is being expanded, tweaks to db and server software are being done, automated deployment scripts, sections of waffles will likely need a rewrite too... Lots of work to do.

So, hold on.