So one of the biggest problems we’ve faced… for a very long time… is that as leagues age, the size of their databases grow.  Our first / original league: the TJHL, was at around 2.5 GB.  Now when you think of SavePoints…  each SavePoint is a snapshot…  so you have each one running around 2.5GB (or less for older ones)…  and consider that we have quite a few savepoints…  that’s a LOT of storage space.  Since we are now updating SavePoints as part of our release process, it also makes the load / save time a lot longer.

So we’re using gzdeflate and gzinflate to compress the PlayByPlay data found in the Game Details (regular and live) tables…  When we consider the table went from 1.1GB to 233MB with a very minimal increase in load time, I’d say we’re looking pretty good.  It was a necessary evil to do the conversion during prime time but for a release like this I absolutely needed all of my faculties.

As we’re still in the process of backing up the existing savepoints as this blog post is being written, I’ve decided to temporarily disable SavePoints so that we can bring UHS back online for everyone to use again.  Once the backups have been completed, I’ll kick off the compression script and start converting the savepoints over night.  Hopefully when I wake up tomorrow morning there won’t be any errors and we’ll be good to go.  I’m pretty sure the entire compression process is going to take around 8 hours or so.

Once SavePoints are available I’ll send out an email letting everyone know.

Thank you all for your patience.