I spent the morning catching up on emails I put off over the weekend. This included accounting follow-ups, payment system integration follow-ups and the usual catch-up on cheaters and foul-play. You don’t even want to know how much time goes into the last of those!

Today’s Worklog:

• Brought bm4 and bm5 (the current two active mirrors) up-to-date with Debian 8 (jessie). Also took the opportunity to switch bm4 over to hhvm, as it was still using php-fpm for some reason.
• Added support for regional mirrors. Currently this is done by providing a CSV list of ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 country names in the database row for a mirror. If present, that mirror will be used exclusively for the regions specified. An entry of null means it will behave normally, for countries with no exclusive mirror specified.
• Added the ability to remove mirrors from the mirror rotation. Until now, mirrors would automatically be disabled when they are not available, but in the disabled state they would build up a queue of commands to run when they return. For mirrors that aren’t really planning on returning, this queue gets really full really fast (think purging WIP beatmaps each time the creator updates them), so rather than having to remove the mirror entries from the database, I wanted a way to stop them receiving queued events and being checked for recovery.
• Updated the mirror-side download script to have more verbose checking on whether the files it received from Amazon S3 are complete and correct. If they aren’t, they are re-downloaded each time a user requests them until they are found to be the right size.
• Commissioned osu!’s first EU mirror server. It’s still in a state of initialising, as it synchronises almost 1tb of data over, but this doesn’t affect its ability to serve the full EU player base. As with alll beatmap mirrors, the server specs are dual core latest-gen xeons with 64gb RAM (think file cache) and two 2tb drives running in RAID1 for boosted performance and redundancy. 500mbit traffic burstable to 1gbit.
• Continued work on the new modular store product page which will allow for username changes to happen. As the new osu!web infrastructure is still in early stages, progress takes a while as we plan exactly how to go about implementing particular scenarios. I hope to open the new website source up to the public in the coming weeks (it was made with this in mind). Keep a watch out :).

If you’re in the EU, let me know how the new mirror is treating you (your downloads should be coming from bm6.ppy.sh; let me know if otherwise)! Are you getting better speeds than before?

Next on the mirror list is a server in Oceania/South-East Asia. Something like South Korea or Singapore would work nice, I think.