There have been no updates for a while as I was working on some essential things that I hope will improve your experience with the site.
Improved performance and reliability
First and foremost, I was looking into the source of issues with files being uploaded to the site. It turned out that the assumptions I’d made about how big the data in saves can get were wrong. This caused many files to fail processing as the data could not be saved to my storage model. This was especially common with Victoria’s 3 saves. I have reworked the internal storage model, and now 99,9% of files can be correctly parsed and saved in PDXGA. I have also reduced the storage size per file for V3, resulting in quicker page loads for the V3 ledger.
The second problem that has been reported by users and which I’ve also observed was the slow processing time of saves. While it was okay-ish on my local PC, the performance in cloud computing was awfully low, causing many files to fail processing. After some profiling, it turned out that I’d left some obscure debug code in the production. Once I removed that code, the parsing performance increased by over 100%, and almost no files failed processing. What does it mean for you? Well, faster results when you upload save and much less chance that uploads will fail due to timeout.
More bug fixing
Another nasty bug that has been removed is related to upload interaction – it has been reported that all uploads fail due to errors. The actual uploads worked for most cases, but the data on processing progress has been incorrectly handled, and users were provided with information that the upload failed. It has been fixed, and the upload progress indicator now works as intended.
It also turned out that in September 2022, I made a small change that disabled the detection of file duplication. Combined with the bug above, when people tried to upload files multiple times (thinking that the upload failed), it caused some files to come in multiple copies. This has been fixed as well.
Feature enhancements and next steps
As I was focused on performance and bug-fixing, there are only two feature changes:
- Support for Victoria 3 version 1.2 (released in March 2023)
- Time range selection for general statistics view (such as the history of saves uploaded to the site). You can now select a time range of 1 to 60 days (previously, it was fixed last 14 days horizon). And that bump in a number of files you see at the beginning of April is caused by the performance and storage fixes I’ve made. The number of incorrect files in the system is now down to a dozen of edge cases or files coming from old versions of games that I don’t support (like HOI4 v 1.4).
