Factorio Forums

The original title was "FIX THE DAMN MOD PORTAL!" (yes, caps)

"Download failed"... I can't even update the mods it manages to download, it just fails. You made this bed, now effing lie in it! Biggest bug at the moment.

The website also broke down.

We are working on it,

But a new website isn't written overnight,
And there isn't some 'fix mod portal' button we can push

Klonan wrote:We are working on it,

But a new website isn't written overnight,
And there isn't some 'fix mod portal' button we can push

You have tried the "give more server resources to mod portal" button? I'm not talking about features like comment notifications. I'm talking about using the portal for its main purpose installing and updating mods. And it pretty much fails most of the time now.

most good mods are published in this forum. this might help you install the mods manualy like older days ;P
or try to pm the owner of the mod. you can find this easily inside the mod files.





dont forget! always give honor to the mod-creator they are brilliant!

Jürgen Erhard wrote:

Klonan wrote:We are working on it,

But a new website isn't written overnight,
And there isn't some 'fix mod portal' button we can push

You have tried the "give more server resources to mod portal" button? I'm not talking about features like comment notifications. I'm talking about using the portal for its main purpose installing and updating mods. And it pretty much fails most of the time now.

Yes, we've increased server capacity several times since 0.15 release,
But it there are always periods of peak usage, which is generally friday nights and the weekened, where even with all the extra capacity, demand is extremely high

Klonan wrote:demand is extremely high

I'm curious, how much stuff does get downloaded in peak times, roughly?

I've added this to the known issues topic viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3636
I'm also going to move this to known issues because the developers are aware of the problem and are working on it.

Moved to Known Issues

so, is the portal fully down, or is it a matter of hit and miss while using the ingame portal?

Dojums wrote:so, is the portal fully down, or is it a matter of hit and miss while using the ingame portal?

It's a hit and miss. Last night I had around one in five chance of getting a response from server.

yeah, ive notoiced, hit and miss ..


some work with 1 click, others i have to re-try 20 times or so before it gets actually installed

hoho wrote:

Klonan wrote:demand is extremely high

I'm curious, how much stuff does get downloaded in peak times, roughly?

At peak times the transfer rate exceeds 40Mb/s (Average over 2 hours),
In the last 2 weeks over 3TB of mod data has been downloaded

its downnnnn

I think this might be the longest time it's been down so far.

This sound very much like your client makes something wrong when trying to connect.

Either that or the way you return the list to the client is very cumbersome how about instead of upgrading the server trying to improve the code?

You know its very unlikely that every client connects to the mod portal every time he plays the game to download hundred new mods. Thats indicating something more gone wrong.

andy84 wrote:This sound very much like your client makes something wrong when trying to connect.

Either that or the way you return the list to the client is very cumbersome how about instead of upgrading the server trying to improve the code?

You know its very unlikely that every client connects to the mod portal every time he plays the game to download hundred new mods. Thats indicating something more gone wrong.

3 TB over two weeks is a lot. That doesn't mean that every player is connecting to the mod portal every time, though. Factorio has over 1 million players - 3 TB evenly distributed over those is less than 3 MB per player every two weeks. With many players using large mods, changing mods frequently, and all the mod updates, that's not that bad.

I wonder how much of that 3TB is made up of transferring the mod list to check updates or install mods in-game.
If it's significant, a relatively easy way would be to divide the mod metadata to chunks according to how old it is. Say, last 7 days is one chunk per day, last 2 months in week-long chunks and rest month or even year-sized chunks.
Of course, there should be a filter to not download/show mods that don't support the current game version defaulting to not showing the incompatible mods.

On client-side, when asking for updated list, check the checksums of those chunks and only download the stuff that is missing/changed. That way, people like me who check for mod updates daily will rarely have to download more than few dozen kBs of mod data.

[edit]
I just did a test with checking mod updates and according to the built-in metering thingy in windows 10, it told me factorio used around 2MiB of data to do that. In other words, it looks like that just could be a major source of that 30GiB.

i know the last reply is so 2017, but....

im having some issues here with the ingame mod browser
most of the time i have to reload once or twice until its connecting, very rare that its actually getting loaded first try
today im at try #10 and its still "failed to connect to the mod portal"

unless its for some christmas holiday reason, i cannot see a "peak demand" time window (GMT+1, 9am, on a wednesday)

for something thats on the "known issue" thread (which links back to here, which has dev reply) there doesnt seem to be much update?

Also, dont wanna derail this, so pm if neccesary: I have alot of mods (when it actually loads) that have no release version listed and i cant download them on my desktop PC, however i certainy have one of them on my laptop. And i never used anything but the ingame portal. Example: long reach, including research (not the cheaty one)
Any ideas whys that?

Factorio 0.17
Planned:

GUI rewrite
Mod portal improvement (Rewrite)

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=678

So it should be finished now.
I mean, the mod portal have work to do, but it isn't crazily slow as before.