Bernice: Which web browser do you use?

That's me.

You can, for example, do it through Swreg by paying for 6-months Brain Knight membership [which is for $10 too]. Then I'll upgrade your membership to Brain Rook :-)

pyloric valve: Of course you can.

Of course. That's your restriction as non-paying member.

Right, I am looking forward to the year when EUR replaces CZK, I don't like exchange rates ;-)

Uil: Just to make some estimation, $10000. That would be a good start. Maybe two machines could be purchased for this price, to make the site more stable [server cluster, load balancing, ...].

Uil: That sounds like a really good deal.

Okay, what do you want to hear? What happens if we collect the required money, buy a new server and some new problem occurs? Does the people want to be 100% sure that everything will be sorted out and no other problems can suddenly appear?
In order to be honest, I cannot promise anything and I don't want to force anybody to pay.

I apologize to everyone that I don't respond to your questions/notes. My ADSL provider is down since yesterday, so I'm temporarily connected via slow modem. I hope it will be better tomorrow.

It includes everything :-) No timeouts until I turn it off.

Please don't look and dates and times in games. I've stopped them in order to prevent any more timeouts until the database server bug is fixed.

Damned computers! For example, BrainKing is currently [22:44 GMT+01:00] incredibly fast for no apparent reason. Which is good news because the problem obviously can be solved. Within some days ;-)

Of course it is okay. But nobody can expect new server within a week :-)

Thanks MidnightMedic :-)
Just to make it absolutely clear, it's more than two weeks ago when Liquid had gone for his vacation in Norway, so it's only me who runs it now. He'll be back on Sunday, I hope.

harley: Thanks :-)
Radiant: I've already done it yesterday.

1) Something's wrong with database server.
2) Liquid's on vacation, he'll be back on Sunday.
3) Until then, I play so often to monitor the site activity and keep it alive when I am on-line. Of course, I must sleep sometimes.
4) I've just added extra 3 days to all games.

Nope. BKR is always calculated with the same formula, regardless on the game ending type.

You just have to fish around ;-) Better DB system will be added later.

There are no restrictions on second and next rounds.

The Rat: See Jetty homepage.

Nope, only one of them. But thanks to the second processor I am able to handle the deadlock without hard restart of the whole server - which could take up to one hour.
There are no other reasons for 100% CPU usage. I've been monitoring it each day during several months and I know where the problem lies. But, of course, killing threads is only one possibility that can be tried, there are more options, I simply cannot test them all at once :-) You know, this site is not my full-time job.

To make it clear - when a deadlock occurs, it simply means that one "thread" is consuming all CPU resources, most likely due to an infinite loop or similar problem. In such case, redirecting non-paying members to the Server Down page does not help. What I would like to implement is some reliable framework for "killing" such offending thread after it was consuming more than 90% of CPU resources for, say, one minute. This task is more related to Linux than Java and has almost nothing to do with the BrainKing.com application.

If it was easy, it would be already implemented :-)
I am just tracking down the suspicious lines of code where a possible deadlock can occasionally occur.

Any idea is appreciated, of course :-)

Ads and banners are useless, this kind of income does not work anymore, the former "boom" is definitely over. I see no reason to place banners anywhere on BrainKing.com - unless some company makes an offer like "we will pay you $1000 each month if you place our banner there". And even in this case the banners would be completely hidden for paying members.

Gubbe: Don't worry. If I like it, it does not mean that I want to implement it :-) It is only my first impression. Actually, there is one more drawback - if a strong non-paying player will create a new account because of deleting his old one, his default BKR will be set to 1300 [as for each new user] and it will negatively affect BKR of his opponents who lost a game with him.

I like this idea. But it must be discussed though before I'll make such a significant change to the current system.
Anybody knows about possible drawbacks?

But as Brain Pawn you can set only 5 days per year.

Observations: There were two deadlocks last night, probably caused by infinite loops due to non-synchronized threads in one internal Java function. It's gonna be the subject of the third test for today.
Average CPU load was about 15-20% which is very good [until a deadlock has occured]. It only confirms my theory that BrainKing application is very fast but it occasionally gets jammed because of multithreading and related issues. Good news are that it is not hard to fix, once I know where the problem exactly lies.

I've just started the second test. Let's see the performance tonight [when the load is usually the biggest].

Yes, according to my CPU and network meters, there was no big downtime tonight. But the work is not finished yet, I will continue today and tomorrow.

Nothing unusual :-)

Maybe I've found out what's wrong at last. I'm gonna spend this whole weekend experimenting with my new ideas.

Ellie: Done.

Thanks for your offer Jason. But there is one problem - such server would have to be here in Prague, at our server rack, due to security reasons. Our main database server cannot be accessed "outside" to prevent hacking and data manipulating.
Moreover, I cannot guarantee that after adding another machine BrainKing will never crash again. I really plan to buy a new server and I hope that it will solve problem - but I am not [and I cannot be] absolutely sure. I have to test it but I cannot ask other people to buy the hardware just for "testing". It would not be fair to them.

Well, what should I say more? I could write server news each day and post something like "okay, I've tried this and that, it didn't help, so I'll use another way of bug tracking tomorrow, we will see" but is it worth occupying the place on the Main page?
I understand that some people are not very happy and I would like to wave a magic wand and say "LET THE SITE BE FIXED, NOW!". Unfortunatelly, it is not that easy, especially when you do it alone.

None of these persons ever contacted me about access problems, so I would suppose that the problem lies elsewhere.

Liquid is trying to find out what is wrong with our database server, please be patient.

There was a small problem with our database server.

harley: You can set only the last day of June because all other days have already passed. Try to switch to July 2003 and you will see checkboxes for all days :-)

Of course it is possible. Use the 6-months Brain Knight payment process to pay additional $10 and you'll be upgraded :-)

Which web browser do you use? I know that Opera users used to have this problem and the only workaround I've found for them was to disable cookies.

Because their last actions are less than 5 minutes old.

Whisperz: It does only if the opened page is "refreshable" - Main page or a game page where it is not your turn. And if you don't have the refresh period turned off.

No, after clicking on Logout link, the player is no longer displayed as on-line.

Of course there is a way. But it costs money and requires more machines to balance the load and separate the paying and non-paying users. I currently don't have this money. We must work with the equipment that we have.
Is that acceptable answer?

Visit "Feature requests" discussion board for the list of games in development.

Just to make sure that everybody understand, as Kevin pointed out, the $250 award is not sponzored by BrainKing.com, it will be paid by Ed Trice himself. So it could go "back to the site" only if I win the tournament ;-)

BBW: Ed (GothicChessPro) will monitor all tournament games and I am sure that he will recognize any unusual behavior :-)