AGORA GAMES

Well, we’re back from Vegas! And have been, for a couple weeks… I’ve been meaning to put up some follow-up resources for my talk (PWN Your Infrastructure: Behind Call of Duty: World at War), but there was just so much work to do when I got back… such is the life of a system administrator!

That said, I’ve got some free moments, so I’m putting up some reference materials.

(more…)

Usually we use standard caching methods on our site (primarily fragment caching to avoid DB queries).

Occasionally we need to do something more fancy. These instances usually come up when we’re splitting one query into two because rails doesn’t support :force_index or :adapter_specific_find_options on ActiveRecord::Base.find. We understand this motivation but really hate ActiveRecord::Base.connection#find_by_sql or ActiveRecord::Base.connection#execute. These are not rational hatreds.

So when we get into a situation where we’re going to be caching manually it’s usually in the controller and we almost always end up with a pattern of:

@object = Rails.cache.read('really/complicated/and/stinky/key')
if @object.nil?
@object = what_should_my_object_be?
end

That’s fine in a contrived example but we were doing this in about 10 different places and it looked like a good candidate for drying up.

Here’s the solution we use:

module ActiveSupport
module Cache
class Store
def read_and_write_if_nil(key, options = {})
object = read(key)
if object.nil?
object = yield
write(key, object, options)
end
object
end
end
end
end

And the production example looks like this:

account_ids = Rails.cache.read_and_write_if_nil("member_ids_for_clan_#{@clan.id}", :expires_in => 5.minutes) do
@clan.members.find(:all, :order => 'groupies DESC', :select => 'accounts.id').collect(&:id)
end

(Or, an adventure in pain!)

Let me preface this little article by saying I did not write the app I am now porting to our new network. I know noting about its specific intricacies, and furthermore, I know nothing specifically about gettext, file_column, or attachment_fu. So, I dove into this project with a sort of wanton abandon that is fairly characteristic of much of the work I do. Any obviously stupid mistakes below thus really happened.

Let me also preface this with the fact that this Rails app is old. Version 1.2.3 old. So, as always, YMMV.

Finally, I really wish attachment_fu had proper documentation.

(more…)

First (technical) post!

AgoraGames has been doing community sites for several years now, which means that some of them are pretty old and some of them have particularly unruly codebases, especially one such site. This site (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) ran perfectly fine at launch, but over the course of a year-and-a-half has slowly gone from speed-demon to slug-stuck-in-molasses.

(more…)