As part of our project to get off S3 and dramatically reduce costs, we're gonna start serving outfit images that Impress 2020 generates, fronted by Vercel's CDN cache! This should hopefully be just as fast in practice, without requiring an S3 storage cost. (Outfits whose thumbnails are pretty much unused will be evicted from the cache, or never stored in the first place—and regenerated back into the cache on-demand if needed.)
One important note is that the image at the URL will no longer be guaranteed to auto-update to reflect the changes to the outfit, because we're including `updated_at` in the URL for caching. (It also isn't guaranteed to _not_ auto-update, though 😅) Our hope is that people aren't using it for that use case so much! If so, though, we have some ways we could build live URLs without putting too much pressure on image generation, e.g. redirects 🤔
This change does _not_ disable actual outfit generation, because I want to keep that running until we see these new URLs succeed for folks. Gonna wait a bit and see if we get bug reports on them! Then, if all goes well, we'll stop enqueueing outfit image jobs altogether, and maybe wind down some of the infrastructure accordingly.
We've been serving images directly from `impress-asset-images.s3.amazonaws.com` for a long time. While they serve with long-lasting HTTP cache headers, and the app requests them with the `updated_at` timestamp in the query string; each GET request still executes a full S3 ReadObject operation to get the latest version.
In the past, this was only relevant to users on Image Mode, not Flash Mode. But now that everyone's on Image Mode, this matters a lot more!
Now, we've configured a Fastly host at `impress-asset-images.openneo.net`, to sit in front of our S3 bucket. This should dramatically reduce the GET requests to S3 itself, as our cache warms up and gains copies of the most common asset PNGs.
That said, I'm not sure how much actual cost impact this change will have. Our AWS console isn't configured to differentiate cost by bucket yet—I've started this process, but it might take a few days to propagate. All I know is that our current costs are $35/mo data transfer + $20/mo storage, and that outfit images are responsible for most of the storage cost. I hypothesize that `impress-asset-images` is responsible for most of the reads and data transfers, but I'm not sure!
In the future, I think we'll be able to bring our AWS costs to near-zero, by:
- Obsolete `impress-asset-images`, by using the official Neopets PNGs instead, after the HTML5 conversion completes.
- Obsolete `impress-outfit-images`, by using a Node endpoint to generate the images, fronted by a CDN cache. (Transfer the actual data to a long-term storage backup, and replace the S3 objects with redirects, so that old S3 URLs will still work.)
I hope this will be a big slice of the costs though! 🤞
(Note: I'll be deploying this on a bit of a delay, because I want to see the DNS propagate across the globe before flipping to a new domain!)
Oops, if you saved `SwfAsset` outside of modeling code, the `item` field would be empty, and so `item.body_specific?` wouldn't happen.
This would trigger when you even just report a broken image!
Now, we always run the SQL query to check for that flag.
Okay so, userlookup stuff hasn't worked in years, because it requires a login now.
But apparently, somewhere recently, the code inside our `neopets` gem started hard crashing, because of assumptions we made about the document we'd get back.
I'm not sure why it only recently started crashing? or if I'm even necessarily right about that?
But anyway, I'm just doing the easiest safest (🤞🏻) change possible: being more generous with the errors we swallow.
Test Plan:
Deploy and cross fingers.
Okay, fine, finally making this controllable from the db without requiring a deploy :P Setting this new field will cause `item.special_color` to return the corresponding color. This mainly affects what we show on the item page, and what colors we request for modeling on the homepage.
We recently flipped the switch for various hosts to force HTTPS, yay! This includes `neopia.openneo.net`.
However, I forgot to change the URL scheme in this file. This meant that the form submit from the homepage would go to `http://neopia.openneo.net/`, then redirect to `https://neopia.openneo.net/`, but only preserve the form data in certain browsers. This change should fix that!
Note: This probably breaks the dev environment, where we don't have a cert for `https://neopia.dev.openneo.net`. I'll fix that some other time!
Interestingly, these items *are* correctly detecting their special
color on the homepage for model progress. So, we *do* have the ability
to detect this. But I don't have good item data locally, so it would
be hard to test this, so I'm just gonna go with the cheap solution
again, sorry XP
In bfd825d, we refactored the "is item body-specific?" check. In the process, we dropped the check for the manual override flag, `explicitly_body_specific?`. Not sure if it was an accident or if I was just _so_ confident that it was gonna work :P In any case, re-add the check!
Okay, surprise, the bug was unrelated to Camo config (though I'm glad I cleaned
that up anyway :P). We now, at a low level, serve a placeholder image for item
thumbnail URL if, for some reason, we don't have a good thumbnail URL on hand.
One time I did a thing called Camo to try to get our HTTPS pages working,
because images.neopets.com not supporting HTTPS is crazy >_> I've diasbled it
these days, but it had debug behavior to append `?NO_CAMO_CONFIG` to all
proxied URLs when Camo was not configured.
When an item had no thumbnail URL for some reason (mall spider needs fixing,
maybe?), this caused Rails to try to map that empty string into the path
`/assets/?NO_CAMO_CONFIG`, which made Rails complain that it was trying to load
an asset that doesn't exist. This is probably a sign that using `image_tag` for
URLs that *should* be external URLs, but aren't strictly *guaranteed* to be, is
unwise - but, for now, I've just disabled that behavior. I hope Rails has a
better escape hatch for the empty string :P
Ooh, this one was nasty, and only one symptom ever got noticed:
1. Pick "Occupies: Collar" in Advanced Search.
You get the text query "occupies:necklace".
2. And, if you try to do "occupies:collar" even in text-based search,
you *also* get the results from "occupies:necklace" mixed in with
the correct results.
The trick is that, in Spanish, zone 24 (necklace) is named "collar",
as is zone 27 (collar). Not sure what to do for Spanish, but this
issue also leaked into English: we really don't want English to return
results for Spanish-named zones.
This is a tricky problem, though, because it'd be nice for es users
to be able to type "occupies:hat". I think we'll have to do the quick
fix for now, though, and just only interpret the query in the current
locale.
Turns out ~22% of our users initially land on a trade list.
We like to keep the campaign off the pages where space is at a
premium, so we try to whitelist it to major landing pages in order
to avoid accidentally creating a bad experience on some page :)
