Posts Filed in "Curse"

We’ve been working on our central authentication service at Curse lately, so we just began porting it’s libraries to PHP. We plan to deploy it across all sites (specifically the vBulletin forum sites) very soon.
In order to achieve a working library in PHP, we needed some HTTP utilities. We didn’t want to create dependencies with [...]

We’ll be releasing a bunch of widgets for Curse/WoWDB, and here’s a sample of one of them.

Throw any feedback you have over here, because we’re glad to hear it

We ran across a fun gotcha today while performance testing some code. The issue was originally discovered when we noticed a 300ms query taking 20 seconds. After about an hour of debugging we found the issue to be with aliases in table locks.
Here’s what our original SQL looked like:

LOCK TABLES files_versiondownloadcount WRITE;
 
UPDATE files_version AS version, [...]

One issue I’ve personally had to overcome with Django, and languages which aren’t specifically designed for the web, is that you don’t have access to the environment everywhere. The environment I’m referring to, is the current request, and response objects.
In PHP there is no response object, at least not one as you would see in [...]

In preparation for a possible change in Curse’s caching strategy, I took the time today to do some benchmarks of memcached. The benchmarks were taken using the standard python-memcached library as well as 3rd party library for PHP (I couldn’t get Leopard working with the PECL package). It turns out, Python is actually fairly fast [...]

It’s been a hectic month getting everything done, but we’ve finally managed to push live the new site.  You’ll find a whole slew of changes to the design as well as some minor tweaks to some of the features. Most noticably:

The header now makes sense. No more double takes and confusion in finding what you [...]

Curse is seeking a Python engineer to join a small development team tasked with ongoing feature development and maintenance of a django based MMO gaming portal website. Candidate should have experience w/ scaling webapps for highly concurrent access, and the issues involved:

Understanding of sharding
Issues caused by replication
Understanding of web caching methods (cache headers, etags, [...]

We’ve put live a new “events” section on Curse.com today. Once again, proving how quick Django is, we whipped this up in 2 days. Currently it’s prepped for the Blizzcon event this weekend, which we’ll be covering. It aggregates data from the rest of the site based on several data keys.
So if you’ll be attending, [...]

We finally managed to get the new site pushed out the door last week, and it’s been one hell of a ride. It’s a complete overhaul of the old codebase, including a completely new template engine (Jinja), a new internatlization handler (in-house), and quite a few tweaks on the backend.
For the past week we’ve been [...]

If you’ve been clamoring for new Age of Conan info, then you’ll want to check out the Age of Conan Hands-On Preview at Curse. We’ve got details on combat, classes, the UI, and much more. Eidos and Funcom invited us out to their Redwood City office to play the game, and we took ample opportunity; [...]