Futureporn progress report October 2024

Hi everyone, it's that time of the month where I post what I've been working on and how things are coming along.

A big focus of 2024 has been improving my skills and knowledge in distributed systems and microservices infrastructure. I'm to the point where I'm confident to start deploying what I've learned in production, but there is one remaining roadblock to be cleared before I can get there. A big scary database migration remains, one that makes changes to the database structure in order to be compatible with the new system.

This database migration requires techniques I've never used before and it's a bit daunting at the moment. I'm taking steps every day to better understand the problem and slowly chip away at the fear of making the change.

Earlier, Futureporn had an outage for half a day due to a service provider's machine going offline. The outage reminded me of that single point of failure in the current system which is solved with the new distributed system that I've been working on. I'm pushing towards that new system and excited for the new improvements it brings.

Another issue discovered lately was a cache inefficiency at the content delivery network (CDN) level. I discovered that CDN2 requests for video were missing the cache 99.9% of the time, which meant that requests were not as fast as they could be, and they used more bandwidth than they needed to. I've made some configuration changes and was able to reduce cache misses, but not by much. We're sitting at 8.83% cache hits, which is better than the 0.01% it was before, but there is lots more room for improvement.

The cache issue is an ongoing issue that will take some more time to solve, and it will become more important as the site continues to grow. We've seen a lot of growth in the past few months, and we've surpassed 400 paid patrons. Thank you so much for your support and for believing in the dream of creating the Galaxy's Best VTuber Hentai Site!

Just the other day I was reminded of another adult entertainment website that for years was #1. ProjektMelody entered the scene and that platform decided to stigmatize VTuber content creators rather than supporting them. Their actions created a void that needs filling, and we're working towards becoming the new platform that hosts the vtuber VODs which traditional adult entertainment websites choose to marginalize.

Speaking of margins, Futureporn operating costs are higher than ever. More visitors means more traffic, and more traffic means more bandwidth consumption and a bigger hosting bill. As we continue to grow, the need to manage bandwidth consumption becomes more important. Even if there are surges in traffic, the site needs to pay the bills and stay online. Torrents are part of the solution I'm working towards, as the bandwidth usage gets shared among all participants.

There are other benefits too, like the content stays available even if the website is down. It's this long-term data resiliency that is really important for an archive like Futureporn's. There are so many potential ways for data to be lost when the data is all in one place. But when the data is distributed, the data is much more secure.

That's all I have for you today. Thank you again for all your love and support.