Connection Cleanup & Personal Time

This week, we took care of optimizing some things that run behind the scenes. In particular, we took care of an issue with active connection logging where some connections would not be automatically cleared from the current listener list. The symptom was that our listener count would gradually balloon over time and become inaccurate. This was due to some connections not sending a disconnect signal to the station, effectively making them zombie listeners (spooky!).

With this change, we also reinforced connection logging at a listener’s point of entry such that, if the system does not capture a join at the beginning, it will be caught by a regularly running watchdog script.

One of the outward benefits of this is related to song rating. If you’ve listened to the station on anything other than our mobile app and attempted to rate a song but were met with a “not connected” error, this update will help by checking the status of active listeners even after the initial connection (but it might take, at worst, up to a minute to show up as connected if the initial connection was missed). This fix will not affect listeners via our mobile app on 1.x who do not get logged, and thus are still not able to rate songs (the fix for this is on the application side, and will be addressed with the release of 2.x).

Other than that, Lunar needed to take some personal time this week to be with family. This is also one of the reasons why the Stage and Live events have not yet been announced for October. Expect announcements for those events in the coming days.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for your understanding and patience as we get through some turbulence beyond the station, and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #34]