| Exzer |
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I'm a huge fan of PFRPG, which I found via Fantasy Grounds. When I saw the Humble Bundle, I had to purchase.
Some suggestions for next time...
As an engineer at a SaaS company that receives millions of requests per day, the realities of burst vs. sustained traffic are top of mind for me all the time. So I must say that your watermarking system was surprising to me. Leaving aside my philosophical differences with this type of DRM (which is currently punishing paying customers with these download times and errors), watermarking PDFs at request time doesn't seem optimal to me.
Once the HB is over, your traffic will dip back down to where the runtime watermarking system can handle traffic without customer complaints, but eventually (hopefully!) your traffic will rise to these levels again, and you will need to throw more hardware at it (which doesn't seem to be a panacea here), or redesign the system.
My suggestion (assuming you won't abandon DRM) is that you pre-watermark N files bases on expected load with some unique hash, and then link that hash to the customer account upon purchase. You could have these files stored in some cheap cloud storage like S3, and make the links available to the customer after purchase/redemption.
For the next HB, you could base the file count on the demand from this one. You get to keep DRM, customers don't wait for PDF generate.
I congratulate you on the success of your HB! I'm happy to wait for these downloads this time, and look forward to the next one.