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This thread will house any updates from our respective teams concerning downloads issues stemming from our increased traffic. If you're brand new to Paizo and Pathfinder, please check our Welcome to Paizo thread, read over our Community Guidelines, and welcome to our community!
If you have specific feedback or questions about these issues, please refer to this thread.
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Originally posted on 2/25/16 at 1:55 PM Pacific time by Chris Lambertz
OK, I've gotten in touch with a few teams and have some words for y'all. Heads up, big post ahead!
The work that went behind the Humble RPG Books Bundle: Pathfinder has generated a wonderful result: as of posting, 26,660 people chipped in to support Extra Life and pick up Pathfinder RPG products. Roughly two-thirds of the redemptions so far are new paizo.com customers. That number is astounding! In fact, that number is projected to eclipse the amount of folks who participated in our Pathfinder RPG beta playtesting. In just over 24 hours. I can assure you that all of us in the office are just amazed to see that number tick continuously upward (the energy here is absolutely palpable).
The easiest way for me to describe what is happening to our downloads system is to compare it to ticketing systems used for large conventions (such as PAX Prime). The system puts you in a queue, which it works through as quickly as it can. If you've ever tried to buy passes for that particular show, you know the feeling of nail biting panic over whether you're going to get to a "Sold Out" page or a page full of badge purchasing options. And that result can take hours to process (and that's not even a service providing on average a ~50 MB PDF download). The systems in place that support the kind of numbers we're seeing are expensive, are maintained by large teams, and are built specifically to handle that kind of load.
Since paizo.com doesn't regularly run and anticipate events on that scale, this is why we're seeing the pileup. We are actively exploring possible solutions, and considering many of the ideas you have suggested in this thread. Paizo.com has had constant and diligent attention to remain stable over the last 24 hours, with our staff (particularly, System Administrator Lissa Guillet and Technical Manager Cort Odekirk) working long, tiring shifts to make it happen. The overall amount of people on our Tech Team available to perform this work is also pretty small (our team is comprised of 7 awesome people, including our Sys Admin and QA). We are examining and exhausting all options immediately available, and hope to have some news for people waiting for their downloads as soon as we can.
As a reminder to anyone under the impression that there's a timeline for redemption: you do not need to redeem your codes immediately for them to be effective, and they do not expire. Additionally, Paizo downloads under your account are updated automatically if a reprint occurs, and have no download limitation or expiration.
I can't say enough how humbled we are by the gaming community choosing to support this bundle benefitting Extra Life. It's also an amazing opportunity to grow our own community and introduce them to the gaming world we've created. Thank you for your continuing support through this fantastic and frenzied promotion!
My team will be posting updates to our site and our social media outlets as frequently as we can get them.
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Originally posted on 2/25/16 at 6:50 PM Pacific time by Chris Lambertz
Likely the last update of the day, but it's good news!
The Tech Team has ordered some new hardware for our personalizing service, which should help alleviate the issues people are encountering. Our System Administrator Lissa Guillet will be working on getting this set up overnight, and we hope to be in better shape this weekend. We also have our Technical Manager Cort Odekirk in tonight monitoring the site's status.
Our Community Manager Liz Courts and Customer Service team are out for the night, and will resume on the emails and social media queries tomorrow.
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Originally posted on 2/26/16 at 8:54 AM Pacific time by Chris Lambertz
Back in the office: New people coming in and getting frustrated by the situation is legitimate. It is absolutely not ideal for us to have folks waiting this long for downloads, and I'd like to reiterate that our team is doing what they can.
I'm currently waiting for some others to get in as well, so I can provide you all with any new information.
I would implore our new and existing community members to please be patient with each other. We understand that in a situation like this, voicing your displeasure in a way that isn't the most diplomatic just happens. We feel you, and we are listening.
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I've got some more insight about the personalizer and process for folks from the team and an update on the hardware update. This should help give some insight:
Once you click to download, the page sends a request to the service to start personalizing your files. If you continue to click the link, it continues to send requests. The more requests, the more taxing it is on this application. The application takes requests dynamically and queues them up, and if it's overloaded, it's possible for requests to drop off. Our team suggests to not F5 and click the link quickly and repeatedly, because that exacerbates the issue.
TLDR: Click the link once, give it about 10-15 minutes (this is an estimate), and try again. If you get signed out, don't worry! Your request in the queue does not expire if you get logged out while attempting to download.
My understanding is that hardware updates are still getting some finishing touches this afternoon.
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Offerings made, sacrifices committed.
The tech team has informed me that the new hardware is holding steady and is preparing for the assault. Please keep in mind the tips that Chris outlined in the post above to best receive your PDFs!
Chief Technical Officer
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The easiest way for me to describe what is happening to our downloads system is to compare it to ticketing systems used for large conventions (such as PAX Prime). The system puts you in a queue, which it works through as quickly as it can.
One thing I'd like to clarify is that while this description makes it sounds as if you're all in one big queue, there are in actuality many queues. And the new hardware let us open a whole bunch more.
Also, while Chris talked a bit about the relative scale of the downloads involved being so much higher than than anything we've done before, I think it's worth pointing out that we're tipping Humble Bundle's scales pretty hard too—I'm told that our first day exceeded their previous best first day for a book offer by almost threefold.
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We've had reports since the hardware update that there are issues when trying to download using Chrome. Chrome has a hard limit on how long it will wait for downloads until it times out. While other browsers to do have options for users to adjust this time, Chrome does not. At this time, we recommend utilizing a different browser when attempting to download from the My Downloads page.
If you choose to use Firefox as your alternate, user KNHaw has written up an extensive set of instructions to adjust the browsers timeout settings to improve download behavior.
We seem to be getting a better response since the hardware upgrade. Nothing new that I can share about the issues, but I'll post as soon as I hear anything!
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Tonight our System Admin Lissa Guillet is working on some server maintenance. You may see a hiccup in connectivity, but after it's complete, some more responsive performance. Folks may have also noticed that the duration time on personalizing has also changed to "60 seconds." This has now been made into an easily adjustable component that we'll endeavor to keep as accurate as possible given our current traffic.