JumpInChat update — Beef up those servers

It’s been a minute since the last update here, but the last month or so has seen a fair bit of improvements, largely to the server infrastructure. As you might have heard from the previous update, the theme for the time being is scale. In keeping with this theme, servers have been scaled up to accommodate more users. That being said, there has been some usability improvements on the side, plus a few other things to boot.

Server scaling and high availability

One of the primary goals of the post-v1 era was to improve the ability to accommodate much more users. This became quite apparent on new years, when a sudden surge of traffic caused the single media server I had running to quickly overload and make broadcasts slow to load and unpleasant to watch. Since then, I’ve not only beefed the servers themselves up but also added more of them. There are two for now, but setting things up to use multiple servers also includes the ability to add more when required.

Aside from being able to handle more traffic, another requirement was to introduce redundancy. This essentially means preventing a single server outage from taking the whole system down, where it can be helped. At present, the chat server works in this way. Another advantage of having servers set up this way is that deploying updates can be performed one server at a time, causing much less down time for those using the site.

Broadcasting improvements

Reflecting the current state of your broadcast is something that has been broken for some time. That is, if your broadcast somehow fails you will still see a local version. I’ve now fixed this so that errors during a broadcast will close your local cam. Broadcasting will also be prevented should you lose connection to the media server.

Restricting YouTube to room moderators

Another outcome of the New Years experience was that having anyone who has registered an account have the ability to play videos will just end up being eternally frustrating. As a solution I’ve added a room setting that restricts playing videos to room mods. This is disabled be default, but is available in your room settings.

Email verification reminders

Verifying your email is important. Mainly because it is the only way to recover your account should you not remember the password to your account. As a reminder, a notification will display if your email is not verified and prompt you to re-send the verification email, once per 24 hours, from your account settings.

As always, go to https://jumpin.chat and make a chat room, invite people and have fun and stuff.

The only way I can make this thing better is having you break it! Or even better getting even more people using it who then also break it!