Antarctic Listener Spotted & Cloud Storage

News

This week, we found our first solid evidence of an Antarctic listener, plus we fought the beast known as cloud storage, ripped out much of our work from the previous week, and restored peace to the station. For more details, read on!

Many years ago, Gensokyo Radio was first able to tout that we had listeners in over 180 countries, but we’ve been limited to mentioning 6 of the world’s 7 continents until recently. We first noticed our Antarctic listener when a monthly summary revealed a single connection on April 20th, 2024.

When we looked into the legitimacy of the connection, we found the listener had also made a handful of additional connections dating back to March 2024. We cross-referenced our data against several additional IP address databases, and we found strong evidence that the connections genuinely originate from Antarctica’s “McMurdo Station” located south of New Zealand. That’s it, then—one step closer to world domination. To whoever you are out there, thank you for helping us cross this milestone, where we can now say Gensokyo Radio has listeners on all seven continents across the globe!

In other news, we found a critical compatibility issue between our current broadcast system and a new storage implementation we had been testing for the past few months. Since removing our collocated hardware earlier this year, we have limited storage space on our primary broadcast server. We moved to using an S3-compatible cloud storage solution towards the end of last week with good results.

When we went to push a small music update of about 200MB of additional files to B2, several issues occurred including a doubling of storage used, hundreds of thousands of additional transactions, and the detachment of all active playlist files causing the broadcast server to go into a fallback operation mode. This also caused our storage costs to increase by 50% of what was expected for the month, in a single day. We eliminated B2 from our workflow and spent most of this week writing a new music rotation system from scratch. This is currently being tested and we’ll have more news when it’s fully implemented.

That’s all for this week! We’ll have a Live announcement this week, so stay tuned, and thanks to everyone out there—wherever you are—for listening!

[Knowledge #167]

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