CVGM.net - Chiptune, Retro & Video Game Music

Hi

This is just a quick post to outline some of the changes that I have been making to the site over the last couple of weeks. The main changes are the switch to the new VM server; Previously, CVGM ran off of two seperate dedicated server boxes in the same datacenter. The first box was an ancient quad-core Xeon w/2Gb of memory that only powered CVGM, it was one of the first Xeons ever released and despite being 3Ghz, it really felt more like a Pentium D mobile chip. Load was always high etc. to handle the site. The second box handled some of the other sites I have, and was also the main supplier of the stream. Those who knew me knew that box boxes were on the fritz, and every time CVGM needed rebooting, I had to put in a service ticket to assist in completing the reboot (otherwise the DNS server wouldn't start, and noone would be able to access the site for hours)!

The new server is a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III, it has 2 Quad-Core 3.16Ghz Intel CPU's and makes the old cpu look even more ancient. It's running VMWare ESXi, so I can virtualize CVGM and all of my other servers and experimental projects onto a single box, maintain backups easier, and even create a live backup Many thanks to everyone who made donations to help with getting it set up & to the datacentre

Without boring people too much of the tech talk, this is a list of the changes that directly affect CVGM and it's services:

- CVGM now has a new IP address, so if you used the old IP for anything at all, it will no longer work. There can't be too many people now who are still using the old IP address setups, DNS normally doesn't take this long to propagate

- We have a brand new streamer VM, we called it "slacker" after the great Falken and the nice thing about this is that it runs on port 80 so even firewalled users can still listen to the stream without having to scrabble for an open port. Slacker also has a shoutcast stream (which moved to port 8000) and is broadcast live on the SOUTcast network. some people can even listen on special radios in their bathtubs (I did get a support email about someone with a hanging shower radio who used to listen to the stream)

- Streamer improvements \o/ A big hands up to maep for all of the hard work he has put into the streamer code. As of this week, we are now using the trunk version of the streamer. The version we were using before was at least 2 years old, leaked memory, had bad bass support, and a host of other issues that caused frequent crashes and problems. Admin members also couldn't fully utilize all of the fields in the song page data that were designed specifically for the new streamer. Now these all work, so admins can go crazy Feel free to yell if you get stuck with anything.

- More stream improvements. One of the bigger internal changes is there is no longer an Icecast stream physically on the CVGM server (on the old server, it ran as a backup to the master stream in case that server went down). How this worked, is the streamer transmitted to localhost (this backup stream) and then the master stream connected to here and relayed the stream. Now we relay directly from the streamer, directly to the slacker master stream. This creates less redundancy, faster stream times (most of the delay has now been eliminated as it removes the extra relaying step). Im still tweaking some of the settings, but it is definitely an improvement. 99% of users will see the stream match the queue playing window to less than a quarter-second.

- Tweaks to Search - I wanted to brag about how I fixed the issues with Search, but as I run a test now, the 5-minute interval update I thought was working fine is actually failing quite horribly. I think the version of Whoosh/Xapian im using is a bit shite and I need to update & fix the site code, but i'll elaborate more on this when I figure out exactly why its failing the way it is.

I really can't remember the 2 other things I drastically altered, perhaps they will come to me as I drink more beer

Other Stuff
While I haven't really gone public with the details yet, there is another radio station coming. I don't want to go into too much detail yet, but this is more of a personal project. I'm extremely happy with where CVGM is going, and this new site is just a spin-off for my own personal taste in musics, rather than for something that is to compete against CVGM. I hope they work together and we get an even stronger fanbase going.

In terms of CVGM, I do need to start teaching more of the world about the site, so reccomendations as to where to spam talk about the site are always welcome

As always, any questions, problems, complaints etc. are always welcome Thanks guys

Thanks fish and all the others involved in the update!

AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE

Work only true could do. Nice job

A couple of points that have been brought up to my attention about the dropping of the stream.

It does happen from time to time, its normally due to something interrupting the flow of data to the Icecast server, so if theres a very brief netfart on the datacenter's part or the code stumbles for a split second, it creates the disconnect. Sometimes, its just because the streamer crashes. Whenever it happens, Icecast has to reconnect itself and the way I had done it before was the system would retry every five seconds. Now it tries every 30 or so.

Each time the streamer starts, it takes the next song from the queue, or picks a random one if nothing is left in the queue. From there, it tries to start it streaming to the server, and of course if Icecast isn't ready yet, it exits demosauce. This is why on some crashes it would skip through a few songs before connection was re-established. Now we should only lose the one song and it should be able to connect in time for the next.

Of course, if this is still a problem, please keep yelling If you suspect that particular songs cause the crash all the time, let me know and I will try to troubleshoot the bug, or just re-encode the track so it isn't such a problem. Thanks guys

We have added new streams! read more about them at New Icecast Streams \o/ and chose the one that best suits you!