There has been much activity on the site this weekend. I guess I should explain a little how the site works… I’m using an architecture called “serverless”, where I code each thing that the site does separately (as a thing called a Lambda). So far there are 17 different Lambdas that all beaver away. Most of them at the moment are cooperating to populate the database. Amazon charges me money depending on how many times they are all invoked and how big they are – here’s a graph of the number of invocations:
I received email from Amazon saying “you’ve used so many of those it’s almost not free any more”. That wasn’t alarming in itself, but what it told me was “the less attention you pay to costs, the more this will cost you”. So I did some research on how to make the Lambdas smaller, and how many I would need and so on. My guess at the moment is that Lambdas will cost me about $1 per thousand users per month. As long as I’m careful / skilful.
So that was why I spent some time doing invisible stuff that made the site cheaper to run. At the moment it looks like the database will be by far the most expensive part of the site (maybe $200 / year), and my plan is to eventually design that cost away. So it’s all good as long as I pay attention.
But after doing that I had a look at funding the site with ads. It’ll never be cost-free, and I don’t plan it to be profitable, but I *would* like the site to be cost-neutral. I was going to put Amazon Affiliate ads on the site, but Amazon said “nope, drfriendless.com is not an appropriate name for putting our ads on”, so that plan died very quickly. So then I signed up for Google Adsense, and the job of actually sticking those ads in is yet to be done.
Just have a look at this page and see if one is there yet:
http://extstats.drfriendless.com/
That’s the stats stats page that I can quickly look at to see whether stuff is progressing. It is progressing, slowly, but I don’t want to crank up the rate of work until more things are working. By my calculations, at full speed I would need to fire off 100 tasks every minute to support 3000 users. At the moment I’m just doing 10 per minute.
What does stuff working even mean? The site has been downloading game information for a couple of days, but it was throwing away the categories and mechanics. So I added the ability to record those. I also cleaned up the database so that I don’t store categories and mechanics by name everywhere, which will make this site more efficient than the old one (and hopefully faster, goodness me the old site is slow). That involved some work with foreign key constraints and async / await stuff which is a bit beyond the scope of this blog, but made me happy. And now categories and mechanics are going into the database.
The next step will be some sort of War Page and some sort of Front Page (with game rankings). I’ve decided those are the minimal features I require before I tell new users that the site exists. And the War Page will link to the user-specific pages, as the old site does.
Well, that’s enough chit-chat, I’m going back into the code mines.
