Hello,

I have a very problematic error occuring when I try to export my armies into any format. Even though everything is going fine with the editor, when I try to export the file, I get this error very frequently :

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/www/armycalc.com/httpdocs/calc/tools.php on line 10

I admit that my definition files are huge, but timeouts of 30 seconds for an export ? It shouldn't take more than 3 seconds anyway. Is there a possibility to fix this please ?

Hi,
I have increased the maximum execution time, please try again.
But you are right it should not take so long.

Which of your rulesets does this happen to?
Can you provide me a link to an army this happened with?
(like [armycalc.com])

cheers

[armycalc.com]
[armycalc.com]

Honestly, it happens with my 4 custom lists and with almost all armies I make. Usually, I get the crash once or twice and then it finally works, but when the armies are especially big, it just won't work.

Have tried like 10 times to export the 5k Orcs & Goblins list, it just won't work. I get the same error message with 600 seconds instead of 30.

EDIT : I don't know if it is linked, but the online editor is almost worse now. The save button does not work properly, there is a "please wait ..." under the list that stays there for 13135684 seconds and the list is never saved.
Globally, the site has been slower and slower and slower for 2-3 months now.

That combined with the problems on the offline editor (encoding problems, export problems), make that it is harder and harder to use ArmyCalc to make lists nowadays

Sad to see it gets no real support, as the basic idea is fantastic.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/10/2011 02:08PM by Far2Casual.

I totally understand your frustration, I would be frustrated myself
However, recently I do not have any extra time to improve this non-profit project. However I won't allow it to get worse. Hope you can understand all the delays.

I have investigated this a little bit more. Seems like our cheap server (which is shared with few other services) is simply starting to get overloaded. Furthermore I guess there were no rulesets as complex as yours before and now I see lots of flaws in the online calculator.

For example: it is sending xml with your army with each validation and other request.

Temporary I have disabled pdf generation as I saw that this was hanging the webserver the most (pdfs are generated by external application).

I have few ideas on how to make this work faster. I am planning to make the validation and exporting the army requiring to save it first. I think that 'validation on the fly' is a really cool feature but first of all it is more important for the whole thing to be usable as you said. Just need to ask you for a little more patience.

Dude, I am so sorry if I looked angry or aggressive in my previous post, it wasn't intended at all. I only wanted to say that all the ideas put into the website and the application are really amazing, and it is so frustrating to not be able to use them because of some details.

Validation on the fly isn't simply worth it. It's obvious it just takes way too much CPU time. Just make a validation button and/or launch an automatic validation everytime we save the list, and really it's sufficient.

In any case, you don't owe me anything, so thanks once again for the amazing work. And if you need a little bit of help, I have some development skills and am maybe able to help you out if want to.

EDIT : WOW ! The difference is amazing, I was able to export my huge list in 1 second ! Thanks a lot !



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/12/2011 01:33PM by Far2Casual.

I know it was not aggressive.
I'm just explaining myself because I know this project should work better.

Anyhow,
If it is steal working fine then it was the PDF generation application that was killing the server. Need to find some other way to generate PDFs.
I changed the validation so it runs only after saving the army, this should also help.