The Ironopolis Hattrick Blend

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FeedJumbler — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:41:26 GMT

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Error reading source feed.

FeedJumbler — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:41:25 GMT

Error reading source feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/HattrickHub: The root element is missing.

Error reading source feed.

FeedJumbler — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:41:24 GMT

Error reading source feed http://club.hattrick.org/common/rss.asp?CHID=15668: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.

NrgJack - Table Generator || Hattrick Tool

Escafeld — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:38:52 GMT

Tool for generated HT-Code for tables.

Craig Wozniak - hattrick

Escafeld — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 11:42:10 GMT

First non-Swedish player to reach divine experience.

NrgJack - Tool to evaluate TDFs

Escafeld — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:14:26 GMT

Hattrick Tool to evaluate Technical Defensive Forwards

Hattrick training speed tool

Escafeld — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:28:50 GMT

(none)

BEACH-O-MATIC

Escafeld — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:30:29 GMT

Image blog from the guy that produces illustrations for hattrick.

Training Speed Research

Escafeld — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 04:35:33 GMT

A research project for the online football manager game Hattrick.

Hattrick Manager

Escafeld — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 04:49:47 GMT

Hattrick Manager is a tool for the onlinegame Hattrick where you coach a virtual football team. With Hattrick Manager you may (offline) sort your players, do analyses and pick out your team with help from several features designed to improve your skill as manager for your soccer team.

Hattrick Livefox

Escafeld — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:48:07 GMT

Match viewer for Hattrick

HAG - Midfield calculator

Escafeld — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:33:32 GMT

Hattrick tool to calculate your midfield power!

Hattrick Midfield Rating Calculator

Escafeld — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 07:02:54 GMT

Calculate your midfield power!

Calculate Deffor Talent

Escafeld — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:57:14 GMT

Online hattrick tool to calculate talent scores of technical defensive forwards

Englische Originaltexte - Hattrick Youth-System Wiki

Escafeld — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:40:48 GMT

Trainer comments for youths

Hattrick England

Escafeld — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:52:50 GMT

(none)

Hattrick | Special events & Weather events

Escafeld — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:55:13 GMT

An overview on how special events and weather events arise in matches.

LoddarStats - What are they?

Escafeld — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 09:59:39 GMT

Help File

Is Alltid dying?

No. But here’s an update on what’s going on.

I’m sorry to say that not much has happened since the last update. The reasons are mostly that things got delayed again and again after both me and HT had to prioritize other projects. As you know, HT has made some very big changes lately.

You might also be aware that I’m not a full time employee of Hattrick or Extralives – I work as an external consultant. Originally we had a pretty tight schedule for how everything would work out, but unfortunately the work was much more time consuming than I had originally thought. And as time went on, there were other projects I needed to focus on, so things have moved very slowly.

That’s the very quick explanation of why things have stalled lately. But I’m tired of spending my energy on analyzing why things aren’t as they should be. Let’s instead discuss the way forward!

As I’ve talked about, the largest hurdle has always been getting the backend in place. I’ve worked for the last couple of weeks to get the rest of the data in place, and we’re nearly there. As I also mentioned in the last post, the framework for getting stats to the Hattrick.org site is also in place.

After we added some stats to the Stage servers, we’ve gotten some doubts about creating a “Stats Center” as we originally planned, and if there’s any point in actually adding a “separate” part to HT when we already have Alltid which shows the stats. It feels like we shouldn’t just clone Alltid, but do something new when we do that. The alternative is to sprinkle the stats around the site, wherever it feels logical to have some stats.

We’ll discuss implementation this week, and do some tests, while I continue my quest to complete the stats database in HT. I’ll keep you posted on the progress!

Some of you have noticed that some of the older seasons has disappeared from Alltid. I’ve removed them due to low disk space on the database servers, but don’t worry – they’ll be back soon. Other issues – especially regarding the new ME – will also be resolved when we’re on the new server.

There will be more updates coming as things are progressing.

Some changes to player data

This week I’ve made some changes to top players and dream teams. The result should be more accurate data, and a lot faster data retrieval. I’m sure you’ll notice during the weekend when the site is usually very slow.

Unfortunately this has had some bad effects on the groups, federations and team compare data for those stats. It should be solved in time for the weekend updates though.

I’d also like to thank everyone who posted on the last news. It feels great to get that kind of support even though things haven’t been as they should with the site lately.

Player History

The player history is now fetched from hattrick directly. A couple of things related to this:

Friendlies and cup matches are once again in the player history
Weather events are missing from the last seasons
League-links are broken for friendlies

Alliances have also been updated to work for season 41.

Alltid In Hattrick - An Update!

It’s been a while since we promised you that Alltid Stats would become a part of Hattrick. Since then things have been moving slowly, and you haven’t heard much from any of us about the status of the project.

Today I’m happy to say that at least some of you will be able to see the first small steps toward the new Hattrick StatsCenter as we’re releasing some code to Stage.

There hasn’t been much visible progress, but we’ve done a lot of things in the background. The most important are:

Transferring 2TB of data from Alltids MySQL servers to Microsoft SQL. That’s a lot of data, and we’ve changed the entire database layout in the progress.
Changed the MatchEngine to push stats directly to the new StatsCenter. In fact, it has been doing this for the last three seasons already.

And now we finally have the building blocks in place for generating the layout. It will progress a lot quicker from now on, and I hope you all will enjoy the new StatsCenter once we go live.

As I mentioned, it will appear on Stage first, and then we will slowly move parts of it over to Live, once we feel they work well enough.

The Alltid Bug Tracker is now closed, since the time is spent much better on creating the new Hattrick StatsCenter. The import problems we’ve had here the last season are really hard to fix, and they don’t affect the new stats in Hattrick. So they will be left as they are for now.

Player History data errors

As many of you have reported, there are a lot of problems with the player history data. This has happened because of corruption in the databases due to a constant state of low disk space on the database servers.

I don’t think it’ll be possible to fix these problems in the alltid database, unfortunately. So next week I will try to switch the player history stats from using the Alltid DB to using the Hattrick DB directly. That should take care of the problems :)

Back to normal

Everything should be back to normal again after some problems after this weeks updates. The problem was due to corruption in one of the tables of one server.

During these problems some of you have been able to see the data, while others report that they don’t see anything. The reason for this is that it’s all depending on which server is handling the requests and if the data is already cached. It should work correct no matter which server you’re on now though.

Experimental imports, and a promotion

Some changes to the imports today:

The imports for every country now starts directly after the last match in that country has been played. This means that some countries are updated a lot earlier – some countries up to 12 hours, and some countries starts a tad later than they used to.
I’ve added an “Experimental import”. You can see the progress for this under the progress bars for the regular imports. This import works in parallel with the others and updates the same amount of data but in a different way. Hopefully this import will usually finish at least as fast as the regular import.

So far only the aggregated player data shows data from the experimental import. This means Top players and Dream team for “round 0/all”. It also means that this data is visible as soon as the experimental import is done, even if the regular one was finished earlier.

Another effect of the experimental import is that those of you who are missing some players in the views I mentioned should be able to see all players now. And please remember – it’s normal to see players who are no longer in your team on those pages, since it’s a summary of the entire season. Switch to the last round to get a current picture.

Let me know how you experience the changes, and I’ll move some more stats to the new experimental import over the weekend.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve been given some promotion codes for another site which is made by members of the Hattrick community. It’s not a Hattrick site, but it’s very cool. It’s a duel based betting game, where you play in leagues and duel against other players. You can play in big leauges, or create smaller leagues for your friends. With the promotion code you get 1 month of free premium membership, which means you have no limits on number of leagues and challenge you can create. Use this link to get the bonus: http://friendlyleagues.com/en/promo/alltid (valid until 8th of november)

New season, some fixes

Another season has started, and I’ve taken the opportunity to fix a couple of problems:

No more “unable to load team” on teams which are in the database.
Missing/wrong team names should exist and be correct.
Added a couple of missing league levels (Italy XI and Hungary VIII).
The missing player names should be fixed on the next import.

Good luck to everyone in the new season!

Ok, let's try this...

Sorry about the problems this weekend. I switched most of the stats to use the Hattrick database, which should give you better data with faster updates (eventually). Unfortunately I was unlucky with my timing, as the part of the Hattrick database Alltid uses decided to act up. It’s under control now though, but the imports have been queueing up more than I expected. Sorry about that.

I’ll talk more about the new database later. But for now, there are some issues I know about:

Compare/groups/feds might not work as expected, but please report if you see problems.
Those of you with “team does not exist” errors will still get these errors, but we do have your data. It’ll probably not work correctly until next season though.
The dream team auto-setting seems to choose the worst option instead of the best. I’ll look into this.

If you see any other problems, please report them in the comments.

That was a bad idea... But databases are fun, right?

Update: Stats are back.

I’ve disabled the stats temporarily, and will import the missing data (player data) into the Alltid databases before the site opens again. It’ll probably take the afternoon. Sorry about that.

And now for an explanation of what’s been going on this weekend.

We’ve had all the data we needed for Alltid in the Hattrick databases for quite a while. The data was never updated “live” during the weekend before though. I enabled it this weekend, and switched over Alltid to use the Hattrick database. Unfortunately, that didn’t go as well as I hoped:

I was very unlucky and encountered a database error which delayed everything for 12 hours.
The data processing in the Hattrick database is way slower than expected on larger leagues, which made everything queue up or fail.
There are lots and lots of different ways of accessing the Alltid data, and the data set is huge. Seems like we need to do some changes to make the server able to handle all variations of stats without slowing down.

Since there’s no stats to look at right now, I’ll take the opportunity to geek out and talk a bit about the challenges regarding database design and the huge amount of data we are looking at. I’ll say what I just said, but in a lot more words. You’ve been warned.

Simple Explanation of Databases
When you create a database there’s always a fine line between 1) how fast you can read from it, 2) how fast you can write to it, and 3) how easy the data will be to maintain.

To read from a database, you need indexes (like the index in your phonebook) so the server can look up the data quickly. But generating an index takes time, and it takes more time the more data you a) have in your database, and b) want to add to the database.

So keep in mind:
No indexes = fast writes, slow reads
Lots of indexes = slow writes, fast reads

The Original Alltid Database
The Alltid database runs on very modest hardware, because I never had much money to spend on it. In fact, I bet the computer you are using right now is faster than the Alltid DB servers.

The old Alltid database completely ignored maintainability and went straight for writes as the main priority with reads as a close second. I accomplished this by separating the data into lots and lots of small independent chunks in the database. It’s what we call sharding). This means that whenever a huge amount of data is added to the database, there’s very little or no existing data in the shard it’s writing to. It also means we can spread data easily across servers.

So the imports were very very fast.

But what about reading from the database? Well, as long as the data you wanted was within the same chunk of data (shard), this was incredibly fast. But as soon as you went outside, it was very slow, since there was no way to easily look up data between shards.

It was a reasonable tradeoff, and something which the database software (MySQL w/MyISAM tables) excelled at.

The New Hattrick Stats Database

Hattrick has an insanely huge server for the Hattrick Stats database. They’re also a serious business. That’s why maintainability has to be a priority, and thanks to the hardware it can be a priority. And, of course, Hattrick uses a real database server software (Microsoft SQL Server), compared to the old MySQL (w/MyISAM) server software.

Luckily MSSQL has a lot of built in options for achieving the same things I had to do manually on the old servers, so the data is very very easy to maintain and understand.

The database design is a bit different though. While we’re still using “shards” (partitions), but every shard holds a lot more data. So it’s basically a bit like having everything in a couple of huge buckets instead of thousands of small cups.

This is potentially a lot faster to read from when you want a broad set of data, but requires more indexes. Which in turn makes slow writes even slower. The hardware should be able to handle it though, we just need to find a good balance.

So with all this real hardware and software, why are we experiencing these problems?

The main reason is that we haven’t yet tested it in a real world situation. Because of all the delays in getting things ready, I got eager, and saw an opportunity to use the new data. But it was too early, and it’s obvious that our balance between write/read speed isn’t as good as it should be.

The bad news is that by having the data in the big buckets, every little operation on the database (like tweaking indexes, changing layout) takes forever and ever. On the main table it now takes about 24 hours to add an index. So it’s incredibly time consuming to do changes and tweak things until they are perfect. Even if we experiment on a subset of the data.

In the future, I will do a more gradual switch to reading from the new database. I’ll move one statistic at a time, and look at how the performance is.

I have good faith that all the database work should be complete before next season though.

I’ll talk more about the plans for Alltid/Hattrick/Integration once that work is done.