A crispness in the air

As we go into the holiday season, I'd like to thank each of you for your support of SOE games and the DATA API.

While it is relatively new, this system has been in place for over a year.  It has been spitting up, crawling around and getting into trouble around the our "house".  It is nice to see it start to walk and make friends outside the family.

Okay...enough with metaphor.  

The DATA service will remain in operation, but there will be no changes to the API or internal infrastructure until after the new year.  We have put a throttle on the information from the game team to ensure that our current infrastructure is not overwhelmed by those playing the game.

Specifically, updates from the game that are newer than a particular time threshold:

• 15 minutes for images (paperdolls, headshots, etc.)
• 2 minutes for updated character information

...will be skipped.

I feel that we can loosen this throttle in the near future with some tweaks to our code and the addition of a couple more machines to the infrastructure.  That will happen in January as well.

A number of us will be "around" for the couple of weeks, but not necessarily checking every post.  We are resting up for the next big wave of changes that will be coming.

Again, thank you so much for your encouragement and support of SOE.  It makes a world of difference!

-dan

 

Right back at ya Dan.I'd like to thank you, Zoltaroth, and everyone else at SOE for putting together such a great resource.  It's been fantastic working with you guys and I look forward to the future improvements that will make this tool even better.It's going to be great seeing all the amazing things the player community puts together with the REST API, some of which are already out there.  It really is an amazing resource, way better and with more data than I think any of us expected.Feldon and I are hard at work on the little tool we're putting together.  Hopefull we'll have something to show everyone soon, but not before it's ready.    It's coming along nicely though and we're quite excited about it.  Thanks again for putting all this together and have a great holiday break!Dethdlr

 

for the data update, I assume you mean that, if character info updates at time T, then you will wait T+120 seconds until the next update will occur into the data API's view?

Not that you'll limit queries into the API to one every 2 minutes, I hope

And, while I'm new to the API, I've been whining about wanting this for years... so time to dig in.  And I have all next week off from work.  Muhahahah!

 

As I understand it, the system is set up so that every time a character zones or logs out (and possibly logs in), an update of the character data is sent to the REST API.

The throttling that has been put in place means that if you log in, zone 8 times, then log out, all in a minute and a half, only one update gets sent to the REST API (or at least only one is processed with the others being ignored).  That way the REST API system doesn't get overwhelmed.

Still VERY timely date.  Quite nice.

Again, that's my understanding, I could be off a bit (just ask my wife, she says I'm off a bit all the time.   )

 

Correct.  This will be improved so that we can eliminate this throttle - we know how to do it...it just didn't get in before the holiday.

We do not limit queries by your application at this point.  Make sure you read the Data Policy on how to use this API and the data you get from it.  Be nice so that we don't have to worry about this.

-dan

 

Are there any recommendations about what a "reasonable" limit is?  I've found quite a few that are apparently painful for your database to process.  Many of these include sort fields, where I suspect an index is not present on the server side, although it seems like it should have one.  I tried sorting on the character id, so I get the values returned in a consistent manner should I need to page through returned results.

 

Not at this point.

We have not fully optimized the storage just yet.  We will be publishing a list of what is indexed and what isn't soon.

-dan