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We recently noticed that there were some downtime issues popping up with out app server crashing. Some investigation showed that this was due to Tomcat crashing because it reached its maximum number of threads. As it turns out this is due to OrientDB not actually ending the thread when close() is called on the database, leaving hundreds of threads lying around after requests were finished that would never be destroyed.

Anyway, we're now using the built-in thread pool so this particular cause of crashes should be fixed.

In other news, many improvements have come to the robot pages, and they were tested out at the Colorado regional. We'll be implementing some final fixes over the next couple of days and after that the feature should be ready for prime time.

Additionally, some events were missed for auto-updates over the last couple of weeks. A mass update is currently in progress to make all of the 2012 data current again.

Stay tuned for more!

The porting process is just about finished! All the old data has been imported and seems to be working nicely, with a huge speed boost to boot. There's still a few small issues still being ironed out but for the most part things are running smoothly!

It can be found at http://test.frcdb.net/ for those interested. Please remember to report error pages and other bugs you come across with the "New issue" link above, it helps a ton!

We're currently in the process of porting the database over to a new engine -OrientDB. Some initial testing has shown it to be upwards of 7x faster than our old db4o backend and should finally bring back near-instantaneous pageloads!

Head on over to http://test.frcdb.net/ to give it a try. Currently all team data has been transferred and seems to be working properly, although robot info pages can't currently be edited due to some unresolved bugs. This is still pretty preliminary - none of the event and game/match data has been transferred, but at the current rate it shouldn't be too long.

• Full-fledged JSON API. Though this existed before there were many features that weren't properly implemented. These have largely been fixed, resulting in a considerably cleaner API to access all of the latest data we have about teams, games, matches, and so on.
• New site theme - the yearly redesign! Though it's not yet finished, it should provide a refreshing new look, reduce page size, and have better browser compatibility.
• Speed! No more page timeouts, or waiting for simple pages to load! The new database backend should eliminate most of the issues we've been facing lately.
• For those interested in full offline access to our data: we'll be offering full data dumps of the database as well, in JSON format. It will be downloadable, and contain 3 separate files for teams (with robot info), events, and games (event-years, including matches and the majority of our calculated statistics).

We're also toying with various other features. We hope to make match videos and team information first-class parts of our archive. The current plan is to allow for embedding of YouTube videos for matches (using YouTube's HTML5 apis - no flash here!) in addition to the current basic functionality for robot videos. On top of that, we're hoping to allow teams to upload their own robot photos to display on the robot info pages.

Stay tuned for more!