All discussion related to the services found at http://eye.swfchan.com/services/ are to be put in this thread.

Comments, questions, suggestions, ideas, wishes, problems?

Thanks.

SWFCHAN 4 LIFE. :D

Thanks, by the way.

Morning! I had shut down the mirror while I was at school, loading it back up today and I'm having the same issue others were having yesterday. It's been approximately 10 minutes since receiving:

27apr2012 12:02:18 Listening on 12345 (UDP) and 54321 (TCP).
Initialization complete.
27apr2012 12:02:20 Server: Your mirror is up and running. Thanks!

And I have not received the reflecting message. I've tried to reboot the .jar file a couple times and haven't been able to reflect the flashes. I've checked my router and the ports are still open so I'm not sure why today is different from yesterday. Any idea what this could be?

Suddenly success? Have been restarting every hour or so, finally some response.

If the server can't download a client's list of shared hashes it should notify it via UDP (something like "check your TCP settings"). If you guys are getting the "thanks" message but NOT the "check your TCP settings" it means that something must be wrong between receiving a client's hashes and inserting them into the database. Either that or the server does not try to get the list of hashes, possibly due to a cached instance of you in its memory (it may think it already have your hashes).

Will look into it as soon as I have time to sit down and code on this again. Maybe I will implement an auto-update feature in the future sometime so you guys won't have to perform the update manually. Depends on if it's worth it, eventually I'll hit a point when the program won't need to be updated that much, if at all. I've already got a somewhat long TODO list on the mirror project.

I appreciate that you guys are running the clients! Do you get a lot of traffic? How many uploads did you do in the last 24 hours for example? Not counting time after when you didn't get a "reflecting" message.

Okay, I've downloaded the .rar file but I have no idea how to move files from swfchan to the .rar file to help with the mirroring. Once I can get it running I'm more than happy to host as many flashes as I possibly can. Two things, though.... Can the .rar file share my personal info? And also, what could somebody do with my IP address?

>And also, what could somebody do with my IP address?
Unless you have an unsecure server on your computer (which you probably do not as this is not an unsecure server), or you are hosting you're own internet and do not have an ISP (also highly, highly doubtful), you are completely in the clear. You can't do jack shit with IP addresses, contrary to what the CSI and news shows tell you.

>>3539
Great that you want to put up a mirror! I added a how-to guide on http://mirror.swfchan.com/, please have a look at it.

The RAR file is just a compressed file that contains the JAR file. The JAR file is the actual program. Perhaps I should just put up the JAR directly, compressing it is really just complicating things. The only reason to put it in a RAR file is to make sure the extracted file is put into its own folder, or else it may become mixed with a lot of other downloaded files (not a big deal but it can become ugly since the JAR file creates a couple of files/folders of its own, it's just better to have it in its own folder). Also there might be more files added to the client than just the JAR in the future (although I can't think of any right now). For now I'll stick with the archive.

Anyway, no personal info is shared about you. There's no code in the JAR that can gather such info about you in the first place. All the program knows about is your share and your settings.

As for what people can do with your IP, it's not much. As long as your OS has the latest security updates and your firewall is working you should be safe from wannabe hackers. And if someone "tracks" your IP all they will get is the location of your Internet Service Provider, which already is pretty public to anyone.

2may2012 03:25:27 Looks like swfchan might be down... Will keep trying.
2may2012 03:26:42 Server: Your mirror is up and running. Thanks!
2may2012 03:27:12 Reflecting 72 flashes on swfchan.

One more suggestion, could you add a Sent/Aborted counter to the gui somewhere?

>>3551
Sounds great. That mid-night reconnect was probably not a bug or anything, swfchan could have gotten overloaded for a brief moment.

>>3552
I suppose a filter can be a good idea, but will it be that useful? What would you use as a file name filter for example?

>>3553
That was indeed a bug, fixed it in today's update. Also included is such a counter that you were asking for.

Hmm, I suppose the name filter was something on the spur of the moment. however I suggest the file size limit mainly due to the fact that my upload bandwidth isn't the greatest, and due to that I feel like anything over 3-4 megs takes a bit too long for me to upload for the downloaders that they abort, thus it'd be kind of silly for me to host larger ones. Then again they're all rare and in between, but lots of music video flashes tend to fall in this category.

>>3556
When someone requests a file their browser usually includes a referrer notice of which page they arrived from, if that referrer is not swfchan the request counts as an "outside user". It's there so that you'll be able to download files from yourself if you wish to without it changing your stats. Some very few people has however set their browsers to not include a referrer, then they will appear as "outside users" even though they did in fact come from swfchan.

Also, as soon as the auto-download feature is enabled, I'll set up a mirror.

>>3559
Sounds good.

If you'd like, I could set up a mirror of the swfchanMirror program. Send me a email for further info. :)

Apologies for the miscommunication. :)

Hey all!
So, I'm using a Netgear WNR2000v3 with firmware version V1.1.1.72.
I'm a little confused with the details of adding these open ports.

I go to the Port Forwarding/Port Triggering page and then click Add Custom Service. It has open dialogues for Service Name, External Starting Port, External Ending Port, Internal Starting Port, Internal Ending Port and Internal IP address. It also has a drop down menu for the protocol. I'm not sure where to put what information.

I'd love to be a part of this. Sorry I'm such a tech noob. Any help would be great!

1. WinKey+R, type "cmd". When the console opens, type "ipconfig".
2. Look what your IP Address is. "192.168.0.3" or something similar.
3. Go to the page where you config your router, where you said you had been.
4. Add Custom Service (1 of 2):
> Service Name = swfchanMirrorUDP
> External Starting Port = 12345
> External Ending Port = 12345
> Internal Starting Port = 12345
> Internal Ending Port = 12345
> Internal IP address = "192.168.0.3" (just an example, put your PC's IP here)
> Protocol = UDP
5. Add Custom Service (2 of 2):
> Service Name = swfchanMirrorTCP
> External Starting Port = 54321
> External Ending Port = 54321
> Internal Starting Port = 54321
> Internal Ending Port = 54321
> Internal IP address = "192.168.0.3" (just an example, put your PC's IP here)
> Protocol = TCP
6. Go to Windows Firewall on the control panel (or your custom firewall if you use one).
7. Open port 12345 for UDP.
8. Open port 54321 for TCP.
9. If there's no clear option to open ports (depends on Windows version) you can add exceptions for "java.exe" and "javaw.exe" to access the Internet (these are located somewhere in "C:\Program Files\Java\<...>\bin\").
10. Start swfchanMirror.

another question: Is there an option in INI file to minimize RAM usage ? (I know, this will make it harder for the HDDs).

There is no RAM control at the moment, other what Java's Virtual Machine provides (unlike machine code programs written in for example C, Java programs can not make use of all memory on the system unless the VM says so). A minimum of 250 MB must be accessible for swfchanMirror to run as a mirror however.

Right now I'm aware that the client has a memory "problem". There is no memory leak or anything like that, I just know that the program does take up quite a bit of memory. I'll try to reduce how much RAM it needs in future versions of swfchanMirror. It's possible that at the moment it keeps a bit more than it needs in memory.

I recommend giving the mirror at least 500 MB memory at the moment on v1.0.2 (note that this means that it will use up to maximum 500 MB only if it needs to, it will take less memory if it can), however you can run a mirror with the minimum 250 MB if you like to. The mirror doesn't actually require the extra memory unless your mirror becomes busy with lots of requests at the same time for example, then it's a good thing if the program is allowed to allocate those extra bytes in memory (if you see any OutOfMemoryErrors the VM needs to be allowed more memory). If the mirror load goes down the program will take less RAM again, the Java VM monitors your system and performs garbage collections as it is needed.

Use the Xmx VM flag to set the allowed memory for the program. Usually (when not defined) the VM sets the max memory to a percentage of the system's total RAM. The first time you run swfchanMirror.jar a bat-file will be created next to the ini file, if you run it it will launch swfchanMirror.jar with an allowed max memory of 500 MB. You can edit that bat file to set the max memory to 250 if you'd like.

I don't think I will lower the required max below 250 MB, however I will later try to make the program want to be as small as possible. Though memory handling is difficult in Java since it's done by the VM, it handles clearing of memory automatically whenever it want to. I can suggest it to run the garbage collector in my code but it might not do it until much later. Maybe it won't do it until when it notices that other applications may actually need the memory. After all, a full RAM is no problem as long as no other program needs to use any of it. And as long as there is some RAM to clear for other programs to use as soon as they do need it there's no issue then either.

Try out running a mirror, if it doesn't affect your other programs and if you don't get any OutOfMemoryErrors in the log then there's nothing to worry about. And if you do run into difficulties you can always stop mirroring at any time, no sweat. :)

ps: I don't use router.

Out of curiosity, what download and upload speeds do you manage to get over there downloading for example a popular movie or something from a public torrent?

here's a speedtest I've just done: http://www.speedtest.net/result/2002863963.png

The bandwidth I pay for is 20 MBit/s, actual speed for bulgarian servers / sites is capped at 4 MiB/s, for foreign ones at 2MiB/s, and I hit these speeds when torrenting popular content. Upload speed is rather inconsistent, I've seen 2 MiB/s upload, and sometimes it doesn't reach even 50 KB/s, seems to depend on different countries, and as I observed, on weather.
All in all, I'm happy, as you see they give me more than advertised :)

I just downloaded & tested the mirroring software, copied a couple of random flashes to a box running it, everything seems to work nicely - for those few test flashes.

How do I get it to automatically download popular flashes from swfchan servers for mirroring?

The following (default) settings didn't seem to do anything:
>0801) Auto-mirror new swf-files with at least this many views/day (from newcommer list): 5
>0802) Auto-mirror popular swf-files with at least this many views/day (from main list): 5
>0803) Auto-mirror popular old swf-files with at least this many views/day (from main list): 30

I was thinking I could dedicate roughly 8-10 Mbit/s of my upload for swfchan mirroring around the clock, with above average routing/ping for european users. I can't spare much cpu cycles though, but this shouldn't be a problem if the mirror software works properly. ;)

You might want to include this part somewhere near the auto-mirroring settings:
>There are three requirements that needs to be met before the server starts to send your mirror new/popular files:
>1. You need to share at least 10 flashes that exists on swfchan.
>2. You need to have served at least 20 flashes to swfchan users in the last two days.
>3. Your mirror must have been online for 4 hours straight.

* When requesting a flash from swfchan, the Available mirrors -table shows average speed of the mirrors. IMHO, this is misleading for users. Users with slow connections cause slow average speeds, despite the mirror having much more bandwidth available. This leads to users with more bandwidth always preferring swfchan instead of a mirror. Which in turn lowers the mirrors' reported average speeds even more. A positive feedback cycle. Average speeds are more limited by users than hosts. Not a very useful metric when your aim is to divert traffic to the mirrors.

For example - a user with an average DSL/cable connection (maybe around (4 Mb/s download bandwidth?) sees mirror Anonymous: 200 kB/s average? "That's slow, better use swfchan instead", although the mirror has 2.19 MB/s top speed and the capability to serve files much faster than the average suggests. Hell, I never used any mirrors myself because of the slow reported speeds. Also, many less tech-savvy users tend to confuse bits and bytes, so it might be better to use bits instead of bytes. Would an average joe rather use 2.19 MB/s or 17.52 Mb/s mirror? Which would be more informative?

* No proper logging. Should someone need or want to monitor swfchanmirror's traffic activity in-depth, they'll need 3rd party software. An option for advanced logging (those 2-char ip identifiers aren't helpful!) would be nice to bring swfchanmirror more in line with other http servers.

* Far future suggestion: To attract more mirror hosts, make a simple windows installer that configures the server and starts it up as a service. Next-next-next. Maybe advertise it on the front page. Can't think of a better way to get many people to help.

Also, do you have any statistics about how much load your mirrors take away from swfchan.org?

>>3744
>>3746
>>3747
And the story continues. After only a few hours of test hosting, java started shitting: http://i.imgur.com/k6SGx.png
The server was started with default parameters, ie. directly from the .jar.

So I thought, maybe it's the GUI. Restarted in console mode, didn't help much. Disk IO is fine, RAM usage is fine. Taking up an entire CPU core intermittently isn't fine. This was with 32-bit Java SE 6 U 24, by the way.

Next logical step: upgraded VM to latest version, Java SE 7 U5. Still getting ridiculous CPU usage spikes, but their pattern did change. Java GC related problem?

I'll keep the mirror running for now, unless it melts my server box. Any ideas would be appreciated.

MackanZoor says he still needs to work on resource allocation with the program; he's currently focusing on adding more features.

Also, I second the installer idea; I could compile a installer version for Windows, but I'm not exactly sure how I'd come up with a way to make it run as a service. Would take some research.

If anybody shows more interest, I'd be willing to package every new version of swfchanMirror into a installer for Windows users.

About running it as a service, that's entirely optional, but here's a good resource on that if you're interested:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/83272-how-to-run- a-program-as-a-service/

Simply adding a shortcut to all users' startup folder would be enough. Only real drawback would be that the server won't run when no one's logged in.

Jesus christ how horrifying http://i.imgur.com/JPosW.png

One of the threads in javaw.exe is occasionally (almost constantly with default settings) eating over 3G cpu cycles per second. This is no server, this is a stress test. D:

Also, the intermittent cpu spikes are becoming more frequent as the actual memory usage is approaching 1GB. This shit doesn't work unless the mirror software is rebooted every 2-3 hours.

Any ideas how to tune java's GC so it isn't absolutely horrible?

>I was thinking I could dedicate roughly 8-10 Mbit/s of my upload for swfchan mirroring around the clock
Awesome!

>I can't spare much cpu cycles though
Uh-oh...

>You might want to include this part somewhere near the auto-mirroring settings
I figured people that were interested in that would read the "auto download"-section of the mirror page on the site. Especially since it contains a numbered list, those usually draw attention on webpages. But you are right; I should mention that there are a few requirements in the settings file. I'll add it to my TODO list.

>the Available mirrors -table shows average speed of the mirrors. IMHO, this is misleading for users
Although you are right it doesn't have that much of a difference about the traffic diverted from the site. Most flash files are viewed using the "embed" option, then the server automatically assigns a mirror to download the flash from (if available). The mirror with the least current connections are picked, with a chance to use the swfchan server too so that the mirror(s) don't carry the whole burden. I've added a note to the non-embed download page that informs the user that downloads from mirrors will probably go faster than if they download from the swfchan-server.

I have plans to change a bit how the average and top speed is calculated. I'm thinking that the average speed will be the average of the middle 60% of all connections (when sorted by speed). This way the few lowest and few highest speeds will not drag down/up the average too much. It becomes a near-average that should give a more realistic image of the typical speed. The top speed will become the average of the top 10% of all connections, so that not a single super-high speed will be reported (can be misleading).

>many less tech-savvy users tend to confuse bits and bytes, so it might be better to use bits instead of bytes
I've never liked the Mb/s measurement (or how its more commonly written: Mbps). Talk about confusing. 10 Mb/s = A top speed of 1.22 MiB/s (10000 bits / 8 / 1024 = 1.220703125 MiB). It's better to show the speed in MiB per second because that's how people really measure speed of downloads. It's the speed that browsers report that they are downloading in.

I also always use the correct MiB term instead of the incorrect MB term (even if Windows show file sizes as "MB" they are actually calculated by dividing by 1024, which is MiB (if MB it should be divided by 1000)). This often causes major confusion when people buy a new HDD labelled for example 200 GB. When they come home and format it it turns out as 190.7 GB and they feel ripped off. But the size is actually 190.7 GiB (200000000/1024/1024) which equals 200 GB (200000000/1000/1000). I hope in Windows 8 file sizes show up as KiB/MiB/GiB/TiB so this confusion can finally start to die out.

>No proper logging.
I've intentionally left out stuff like user's IP addresses from the log, so that those that run mirrors shouldn't be able to easily keep track of other people's business on swfchan. The two-character IP identifier was added so that you should be able to see when a single transfer starts/finishes on a short-term, and also if a person is using your mirror to download a lot of files. I won't add much more than that so that mirrors can start to track user behaviours on the long-term.

>make a simple windows installer
A big point of Java is to not make platform-specific tools such as installer executables. Besides, is it really needed? It's one file that needs to get "installed", personally I always prefer archives that you extract rather than installers that you don't really know what they are doing. I know that making things as simple as possible is good (next next next) but those that are interested in setting up a mirror should be able to start a jar file and edit a ini file. Maybe add the thing to the startup folder so it starts every time the computer start. If the program was meant for the everyday joe I can understand why a installer would be needed but most common folks won't download a server program. If anything I might add buttons inside the GUI later that allows you to edit the settings or make the program auto-start upon boot.

>Maybe advertise it on the front page.
Making a site-wide broadcast upon every new version of the mirror program. I've realized that some otherwise interested will miss it though, especially when the mirror updates get less frequent. Sometime later I will add a "site tip" thing at the bottom of every page with random "did you know" stuff about swfchan (for example "Did you know you can make your own flash loops here on swfchan?"). I'll mention the swfchanMirror there so that there's a higher chance people will discover it and might wanna help out.

>do you have any statistics about how much load your mirrors take away
Not really any numbers, but the network load average has gone down from 90% to 70%. It still hits 100% sometimes but that just means that more bandwidth can be given to fewer connections. Several hundred GiB of bandwidth has been saved.

>Java sucks
No, Java is great! Not only is it convenient not having to compile the program into machine code so it works on all platforms, it's very easy and comfortable to program in. I actually consider programming in Java fun, everything makes so much sense. And Java has a thing called just-in-time-compilation which compiles its byte code into machine code as the program is running, which means that the programs executes just as fast as any program written on a lower level (C for example). There are ways of executing C-code from inside Java very easily using Java Native Access (JNA) so you can do all the things you normally can't do in Java (make program hooks that listen to key presses in other programs for example - it's against Java's security model but can be done with C). The memory handling in Java is fantastic with the garbage collection, it makes memory-leaks almost impossible (there's a big difference between leaking memory and a program that requires much memory).

As for the CPU problem you are having, it's very strange. What operating system do you have? I've tried having mirrors up for several days on both Windows Server 2003 (2.5 year old CPU, used -Xmx350m) and Windows XP (5 year old CPU, used -Xmx700m). Both using Java Runtime Environment v6 and both with CPUs that weren't very powerful even when they were new. The process CPU usage is almost always 0%, jumps up to 2% when a connection is accepted and then goes back to 0% after a second. Once a minute there may be a spike of 10-15% CPU usage lasting about a second. Both test mirrors were on heavy load serving more than 6000 files in 24 hours. I got a few out-of-memory errors now and then (I'll try to reduce the memory requirement in a later version) but the garbage collection didn't really make the CPU sweat anytime and the servers kept going. The GC must have run a lot during the day or else the log would be flooded with out-of-memory errors but there were only a couple a few times.

Are you sure it's not another program that causes the CPU load? Have a look at the processes individually. Do you run another Java program at the same time? I think several Java programs might share the same Virual Machine process. Hmm... maybe you have a program up that tries to monitor or interfere with the Java program? Bandwidth limiter or some sort of controller perhaps? Do you launch swfchanMirror from within another process?

Thanks for the feedback! Always welcome. I hope you won't take down the mirror since it seems to be doing much good with great speed. :)

I am aware of the KiB / kB distinction. But I have to admit, I use them interchangeably when precise numbers aren't important - bad habit. I prefer using the base-10 bits and bytes since they still are the leading standard. And bits vs bytes, I guess that's a cultural preference - around here ISPs and us IT guys always use megabits per second when talking about bandwidths, ie. connection speeds.

The whole windows installer & frontpage idea was to make mirroring as easily approachable as possible for as many users as possible. I'm sure you understand the potential benefit of that, even though it goes against the glorious portability of Java. :)

Now, I am not a programmer and I don't want to turn this into argument whether java is good or bad, but I can't host a permanent mirror because java gc uses ridiculous amounts of processing power, ie. java sucks.
I wonder if I can rig application recycling to restart the java process before its working set memory reaches its Xmx value...

>guess what happened in the last case when the server actually filled
Either the mirror crashed or (more likely) the CPU went up a lot since a "natural" garbage collection must have been called by the VM? Perhaps the CPU went up and the program then crashed since it maybe couldn't free enough memory in time?

Btw I assume that you are using Windows since you are using Process Explorer but which version of Windows exactly? It's good to know.

>around here ISPs and us IT guys always use megabits per second when talking about bandwidths
Yeah same here and probably around the world, when it comes to describing bandwidth. And I do that too, when describing the connection capacity. But people usually don't talk in Mbps when they are talking download speeds, I can't think of one single program that says something like "you are downloading bla.rar in 33 Mbps" instead of saying "3.9 MiB/s" (or rather the incorrect "3.9 MB/s", which really still is MiB).

If possible, check back in 24 hours and see if there's a new GC-free version of the mirror. I'd soothe my mind if I knew the issue ceases.

>which version of Windows exactly?
32-bit Windows 7, OEM license. I'd rather use 2003 server, but don't have any extra licenses around. :(

>I have plans to change a bit how the average and top speed is calculated.
Forgot to mention earlier, these sound great!

>talking download speeds
Ah, this is where we see things differently - I was trying to think what would be most informative for users when they see a mirror in the list - The mirror's bandwidth or average download speed from that mirror?
In any case, it doesn't matter as much as I thought since embed downloads choose a mirror automatically.
Perhaps you could make direct swf downloads choose a mirror automatically in the future?

>If possible, check back in 24 hours
I will. I have extra bandwidth, I want to help swfchan, and frankly, this project is very interesting! I don't think I've ever seen a website do something like this. I would be greatly interested in any mirror statistics and performance numbers you are willing to release.

It's too early to tell for sure but so far it looks like I managed to get the program to take up much less RAM, however it increased the CPU usage a little bit for me which I have to investigate for the next release (suspect it's the more exact upload speed that is the cause). But the CPU usage only increased by a single percentage point or two so it's not that big a deal, but less resource requirement is always better so I'll see later if it can be reduced.

>does the "natural" GC use same system.gc() calls?
There's only one kind of GC. The System.gc() call is just something that tells the VM that "now is a good time to pick up trash". The VM can ignore it completely or go ahead and do it if it thinks it's a good idea. Problem was that your VM for whatever reason thought it was always a good idea.

>but it didn't crash
That's the power of Java! ;D Nah, only the thread that requested the memory crashes, the rest of the program (in different threads) that already have memory assigned goes on as usual without even knowing that a thread died from memory problem.

>32-bit Windows 7, OEM license
I'll try to make a test mirror on Windows 7 sometime in the future. I installed Win7 on a old laptop a few days ago, maybe I could test it on that if I get my hands on it again. It has hardware dating at least 10 years so it would be interesting!

>The mirror's bandwidth
But it wouldn't really represent the mirror's bandwitdh since it all depends on where the users are in the world, better to call it download speeds because that's what they are. :) Potato potato, tomato tomato.

>make direct swf downloads choose a mirror automatically
Maybe, but as it is now the user gets presented with a bunch of links and the top one is the one that the server "recommends" (the mirror with the least number of connections at the moment). At the moment that's probably the most logical way of giving the download options, since the server has no way of really knowing which mirror is best for a user.

If I ever implement some kind of system that can compare a user's and a mirror's geographical location and pick out the one that is closest to the user I will definitely have the server specifically tell the user that it should download his file from there.

>I don't think I've ever seen a website do something like this
Hehe, me neither. That's a big reason why I'm putting time into the project actually, it's a kind of experiment. Something new for me to try. And when you try something new you always learn something new!

After the initial swf request rush, CPU usage settled to be a little bit higher than in r6. Still, it's a very low load on any half-modern x86 CPU.
Working set size seems to be growing slowly, its at 900 M and hasn't reached the limit yet.
IO read bytes seem to be climbing up slower and random disk IO spikes are clearly less frequent.

> (suspect it's the more exact upload speed that is the cause)
Does this happen with the console option? I don't need real-time statistics like that nor on-screen log-file buffer, so I might as well run the mirror completely hidden with javaw and the console option - once I'm confident about its resource usage and stability.

Hey, I just found out about jconsole. What a wonderful tool!

>I really really prefer the hotspot server VM
As does Oracle (or Sun) since it's the official VM in Java. I have "Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM version 19.1-b02" on my development machine according to JConsole.

Thanks about the tip about JConsole btw, I've actually never used it before. It's bound to be very useful in the future. It even has a "Perform GC" button!

>Does this happen with the console option?
Yep, the only difference with the console option that no GUI operations are made. The upload speed calculations are the same in the background.

The changes I made today should have lowered the CPU usage that was introduced in the previous version BUT since I fixed the low transfers speeds the CPU usage may actually increase since the mirror could become more busy at serving files. This might cause it to fill the RAM quicker too, kicking in the first GC a bit sooner.

Could you remove the -Xms1024M option from your VM a little while and try to describe how long it takes for the memory usage to hit around 900-1000 MB? I know that making the VM start out with a lot of reserved RAM makes it a bit less CPU needy when it is time to use more memory, you can restore using -Xms1024M later. I was just curious how long it takes for the mirror to reach the set max memory on your system.

>Could you remove the -Xms1024M option
Do not want. We both know this only leads to increased CPU load in an endless cycle... I prefer to keep Xms and Xmx the same.

>how long it takes for the memory usage to hit around 900-1000 MB
I can still help you with that. JConsole shows that swfchanmirror r7 performed its first major GC around the first hour mark, dropping heap size from ~900 M to ~600 M. The collection wasn't a major CPU spike and the mirror kept running smoothly afterwards as well.
I also learned that Process Explorer's working set size != actual java heap size. :(

I'll check how the new version performs.

After about 1h 40min, heap size had reached 900 M with a GC happening every 10-15 minutes.

CPU load averages at about 4-5%, no much difference from the last version.

PS. I don't know anything about all these java memory pools, so I just checked the heap memory usage chart.

My test mirror ran into a issue after about 14 hours of uptime, causing the CPU load to increase a lot and no new connections to be accepted. It's pretty possible it was because of too many transfer requests. I'll have to look into that. It also appears like the mirror has started to reflect 0 files every now and then, I know the cause of that though so it won't be a problem to fix. Hm, actually that might just be the reason as to why the CPU and memory usage has become more aggressive.

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction at the moment. I think I'll treat myself to some pancakes and ignore that it's pretty much morning over here now.

I hope some of you guys will try out the new mirror. I want to hear if it runs any better on your system now.

A shame, really. If not for Java, it could perform the same function while using only a small fraction of resources. It's not your fault; Your software performs very well, JVM does not.

I guess I'll try Garbage First before giving up on Java. It should have exactly the kind of performance upgrade I'm looking for.
>main objectives for the new collector:
>The first objective is consistent low pauses over time.
>The second objective is to avoid, as much as possible, having a full GC.

One can always hope that future VM implements better GC procedures. Although even if that doesn't happen CPUs will beome faster so the drawback will become more insignificant with time.

Let me know how it goes with using the G1 garbage collector, sounds interesting. Maybe it'll make all the differance in the world.

Those of you that are running a mirror at the moment please check it, if it is consuming unusually much CPU it means that a deadlock has happened and it is not killing off threads like it should. You should manually kill the mirror process (the one that is taking up much CPU) and restart the mirror. This thing should be rare to happen so don't be afraid to restart the mirror. From the log it doesn't look like this is related to a out-of-memory issue but rather some kind of deadlock inside Swing itself (code I have not written). Not very likely though, there's probably something I can do to prevent this. Perhaps a uncaught exception that causes a thread lock to not release (though that shouldn't happen, hm). I'll look into it tomorrow or during the weekend.

It's been pretty dead for several months now and no interest has been shown so I'll just make a sidenote here that the project is hereby officially declared terminated. If someone comes along and shows great enthusiasm towards setting up a dedicated mirror I might get working on it again but I don't see that happening.

For now I'll just rely on the increased bandwidth I've bought for the site and on CloudFlare. Luckily swf files are considered static files by them and do get mirrored, I'm only using CloudFlare for the most popular files on swfchan though so that they won't take that much of a hit. That being said it would still be nice with a couple of user-run mirrors out there in the world so don't hesitate if you want to volunteer.

swfchanMirror still works 24/7 if you want to try it out, it's just that I won't be working on it anymore (not that I have been since July anyway). Also your mirror will only be available to people getting the file using the non-embed option. A longer note on this can be read here: http://mirror.swfchan.com/#download

If you'd reveal some sort of api so that I could host the mirror with software I write myself, that would be pretty cool. The arbitrary "only can download new files after X usage" seems a little silly considering my mirror is seeing almost zilch usage (possibly partly due to the lack of embed-usability).

Thanks for the neat idea in the first place, sorry to hear it might be dying.

Yeah I guess the minimum-serve requirement is a bit unfair nowadays, most people do use the embed option. But it won't change since I won't be updating the client or server unless something really unexpected happens. And I won't re-enable mirror usage for embeds since I want the JavaScript controls to always work. The security model in Flash is a little bit too strict in some areas but I can't blame them for wanting safety. It's a lot better than the extremely unsafe web of the old days, I remember how easy it was to make people's CD ROM tray open and close at will just by them visiting your homepage.

>Thanks for the neat idea in the first place
No need to say thanks, but thank you for thinking it was a neat idea. If nothing else it was wicked experiment for the history books (not that it has actually been recorded anywhere except on this site). Its biggest downfall was how much it depended on many people willing to help out around the world, it was doomed to fail from the start really.

Went down for a couple days due to that vps experiencing disk failure for the first time ever. Very unusual :S. Didn't have time to fix it till now, but now it's back up.

You know, one solution to the embed problem could be hosting the entire page on the mirror server (meh idea at best) and the captcha page redirects em there, all the clickable links though go back to the actual swfchan (so now the mirror is doing both the javascript and flash).
Another, better solution, could just be to do an iframe to the swf+js content so they'd still both be on the same domain. I'm not completely sure that would work, but I feel like it would.
Sure, there might be slightly more security concerns there (potential for executing arbitrary flash+js), but hardly since at present a malicious mirror could already serve up arbitrary flash.

Still, if it's essentially dead for good, I don't mind. Even if you think it was doomed to fail, it seems like a really cool idea; honestly, I think it wasn't doomed to fail, it just had bad luck in that some guy with very good servers never picked it up (I think?) and it didn't support embed so it didn't offload the majority of the views. Really, it'd only take 4 or 5 people with decent computers/connections for it to succeed I'd think.

>it didn't support embed so it didn't offload the majority of the views
Actually it did support embed up until a few weeks ago, and it saved quite a bit of bandwidth for a while in the beginning when two or three clients were running. Then I decided to give the seekbar a overhaul. Up until that time the JS controls didn't work like they should anyway so I didn't care about the cross-domain issues that swfchanMirror brought, but after the redesign I wanted them to always work so I disabled embedding for the mirrors. Figured that that project was dead anyways, no mirror-client had been up for a month other than the occasional guy that tested it out for a couple of hours that one day.

The swfchanMirrorClient can still be downloaded because it can be used as a simple private file server with some built-in features that I haven't seen in any other simple HTTP file server. Maybe some guy somewhere some day will find use for it.

nun o the flashes are working on my cpu

New service: http://eye.swfchan.com/services/gifshooter/

A program that lets you turn flashes you watch on swfchan into animated gifs.

The GifShooter has been updated.

What you do is open swfchanGifShooter_run.bat in notepad (you can probably right-click on it and select "edit"). Replace the two words [start javaw] with this: [start "" "C:\Program Files\Java\<folder>\bin\javaw.exe"]. Notice that the quotes must be included. The brackets are not included. The <folder> string is the name of your folder where Java is installed, for example jre6. If the path is not where Java is on your machine you change the whole path of course.

>>5993
I was expecting someone to ask. :) Sure, I'll add that feature to the to-do list. But I don't know when I will sit down to make the next version.

Earlier today I used GifShooter 1.3 and it worked like a charm. Several hours later, however, I have a problem.

I'm on an embedded flash page here on swfchan, yet when I click 'Start', it claims that it can't find the orange border. The whole thing is visible, and I'm clicking 'Start' AFTER the flash begins to play.

Halp?

>>6288
Which flash are you having trouble with? I have to be able to reproduce the error to be able to fix it.

It was actually over a dozen flashes (every one that I tried) where this problem occurred, and I can't remembered exactly what they all were. Some of them were ones that worked on that first try, but oddly produced the same problem the second time around.

One of those that worked at first but then didn't later in the day was: http://eye.swfchan.com/flash.asp?id=79003&n=gnome party.swf

The problem persists today with ALL flashes, including the one above. If you need another example, I checked o the first flash on the Popular page and the problem remains: http://eye.swfchan.com/flash.asp?id=128707&n=Drag onball+XXX+1.swf

Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/hj0l9tT.png

I've added a note on the GifShooter-page about the zoom level so people become aware of this.

Ah ha! Thank you very much! I had indeed messed around with the browser zoom before the problem began and forgot to reset it (I couldn't even tell the difference, whoops).

The problem is fixed and it's working as it did before. Thank you again, both for helping me with this and for GifShooter. It's a great tool!

please fix some of the meet and fuck games that are broken please

New thing: http://swfchan.com/imgtxt/

Made it after seeing many Japanese images being translated into English but nobody bothering to actually format new images with the translated text in them. This tool would make such work less tedious.

Have you considered adding .webm to 4chanlink.org? Is it possible?

I had a system to protect the site from bots before but ditched it to make it easier for real users to link to many images at the time. Maybe I should re-enable it, but on the other hand without the bot 4chanlink would be pretty empty. I'll think about it for a while.

That's a shame it doesn't get a lot of use. I think it's a really great service. I'm sure if some more people knew about it that it'd be popular, but I don't know how to do that. As for the bots, you should just do whatever agrees with your server costs and budget.

Anyway, I'm grateful for the site and this update. Thanks a lot!

I'm happy to announce the release of the FLV Maker - create high quality On2VP6 FLV files with ease!

http://eye.swfchan.com/services/flvmaker/

But yeah, if I isn't easy to actually put the video inside a swf file it's unlikely for many to start using FLV Maker instead of programs that can put any movie file directly into a swf container. Almost all embedded videos I see in swfs uses the outdated Sorenson Spark codec instead of VP6 because all video2swf programs uses that codec.

After what I'm sure has been much waiting I'm happy to announce version 2.0.0 of the FLA Maker!

You can now build .swf files directly using the program.

New version released with some additional tools. Hopefully I can't think of anything else to add for a while now. But if anyone has suggestions or desires please let me know!

This would have worked:

start "flvmaker" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre7\bin\javaw.exe" -Xmx5000m -jar programJar

Since the title "flvmaker" was omitted the path was interpreted as the title and windows tried to start "-Xmx5000m" (which is an argument for the java virtual machine telling it to allow more memory for FLV Maker if it needs it).

Thanks a lot for telling me, I will update the bat file and the webpages immediately.

Tried it with the path to 64-bit javaw -> works
Seems like if you have a 64-bit system, it will only work with a path to a 64-bit java
The Gif shooter worked with my 32 bit java just fine

I recommend to make the description a little bit more vague, so that people put in their own path to the javaw.exe

I've download the gifshooter and I'm running it with a 64 bit system can someone help me? it just pops up the cmd window and it automatically closes it? why? am I doing something wrong? can someone help me? I really appreciatte it!

So I download it the new version of Java and it gave me a new path is this correct to to have in the notepad or is there something wrong?
"C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_25\bin\javaw.exe"
start "swfchanGifShooter"

also when I open the cmd it just stays there it doesnt open java or nothing... what do I do? :( ...

start "" "C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_25\bin\javaw.exe" -Xmx5000m -jar swfchanGifShooter

Decided to take 4chanlink offline today. It was rarely used legitimately and since 4chan started using Cloudflare I think their images stay online for longer than usual anyway nowadays. Besides, it was being used by a site that re-posted threads on 4chan and if the image disappeared from 4chan they suggested using 4chanlink (with an anonymizer to circumvent the referrer check). This created a huge amount of traffic that swallowed 4chanlink whole and made it practically unusable. I never built it for super heavy loads, especially its front page. As I said I don't think the service was used that much but it's old enough to at least deserve a mention when killed.

Version 1.0.0 was just released but it got its own thread over at http://swfchan.org/7214/ so I won't mention it here again. Keeping all discussion about all services in just one thread was never really a good idea.

Too many dead file.That says error 404.What does that mean.I hope The "swfchan.net " server should delete the dead file soon.

Many" thanks Swfchan

Anyone else not being able to see captchas?

Thing is, it kinda worked for a minute, just couldn't record anything, then when i reopened the file it gives me the error.

There is a problem with with AI subeki 17 and 18 when converting them to apk files. When trying to open them it is just a white screen. How do I fix this.

can we get the mayuri vision from comdotgame on here plz I think ppl would love it

After I created a Swf Game file into Android app file and When I installed it, opened it on my phone and it run through like a video. I mean it automatically click on action buttons without touching them manually. No interaction can be made, I just can watch it like a video. Any solition to make it run like a real game..?

Hey, not sure if this is the right place to post this (never have before), but the link for this flash is dead:

http://eye.swfchan.com/flash.asp?id=153923&n=Oppa i+Polygon+4th+Slave+Material.swf

Good news is, I found it on another site:

http://gamcore.com/games/ambivalent_e_oppai_polyg on_4th_slave_material

Is there some way the .swf can be extracted from this site?

everytime i search something it says that half of thhe files found were filtered away. why is that the case and is it possible to disable this filter?

make a vedio how to Covert SWF to APK

Some anon claimed that "whatever the VP6 encoder was doing, it was set to detect and discard duplicate frames which doesn't make any sense in that context. the h264 encoder wasn't ...
so it seemed like a really dumb oversight"

Don't know if that's true, but maybe Admin wants to take a look into it.

Off the top of my head the issue is something inside the mcf config file. In Swiff Army Knife I'm using a static template version of the config file where I just swap out the bytes that represent bitrate, while in FLV Maker it is possible to to display the codec settings window (part of the codec itself and displayed by mencoder.exe). I can't remember why I didn't provide access to that vp6vfw.dll settings window in Swiff Army Knife, either I couldn't get it to work for whatever reason or I just thought it didn't fit well with the rest of the program to have that settings window pop up, but I'll write in my notes that I should try to provide access to it again.

i can‘t recognize the new random captcha and it won’t refresh, causing me to be completely unable to browse flash.No matter how I look at it it looks like there are only three characters like "4VQ".how can i refresh the captcha?

I'm not the only one who tried to ask help in searching for a particular game on the /disc/. Maybe we need a some /srch/?