Various Nexus related things from the Skyrim SE launch aftermath
As most of you know, Skyrim Special Edition was released on Friday and naturally, a lot of people are clamouring to get mods for the game. Skyrim has always been our most popular game on Nexus Mods and the release of the Special Edition has seen an unprecedented amount of users access our site over the past 36 hours. There are currently 16,500 people online this Saturday afternoon (in the UK) when, on a normal Saturday, it would be around 8,500 people. As you can imagine, our web servers are taking a hammering. Thankfully our download CDN is extremely responsive to these sorts of short-term bursts and it's happily pumping out 15 Gbit of traffic to people downloading mods from the site and counting.
Our previous highest simultaneous user count was back during the Fallout 4 launch at around about the 13,000 mark. With 16,500 users currently online right now at a time that isn't even peak time (peak time being 7-9pm GMT when both the EU and US are online at the same time), I think we're heading to loftier heights yet. Saturday also isn't our busiest day, Sunday is. It's going to be an interesting weekend...
The reason why I'm telling you all this is to manage your expectations of this site over the weekend. Demand for Skyrim mods is obviously ridiculously high right now as many people are coming back to the game and starting on a fresh install. We're doing better than we have done in the past, for sure, and we're carefully shuffling our limited resources around to try and optimise things as much as possible. If the site is slow for you, bear with us. Similarly, if you get a bit of "maintenance" downtime or the like, please, bear with us. We've got staff monitoring the situation 24/7 right now in shifts to make sure we keep on top of it, but we can only manage and shuffle so much before things get overloaded.
Lastly, if things get too bad, we'll have to shut off the NMM services (and potentially other services). While NMM is important to us, it requires a crazy amount of resources to keep up and running and if we find it's affecting the performance of the site too much (to the point the sites aren't able to load) then we'll shut NMM login and download services off until things cool down. You'll still be able to use NMM offline, and install mods manually (download the mod to your hard-drive, then drag and drop the mod from your hard-drive to NMM), you just won't be able to login and download files from within NMM until such time as we turn the services back on.
You don't need to tell us when you can't login or download via NMM because we know, we're the ones who did it! If you see people asking why NMM isn't working for them on our Discord or on the forums, please direct them to this news post for clarification.
Lastly, we're aware of a few minor issues on the Skyrim SE site right now. First, we know the favicon is the wrong colour. You don't need to continue letting us know! Second, we're aware of an issue with the categories on Skyrim SE getting a bit...muddled. This was due to a mistake we made before launching the site. We believe we've corrected it, but some of your mods might currently be in the wrong category. Sorry about that, please move it back to the right category for your mod at your convenience. Because of all these category changes, NMM users might find that the categories they see in NMM don't match with the categories on the site. When you see a category mismatch in NMM, click the Category menu button and select "Categories: Update and reset to Nexus site defaults". This will fix the issue for you.
Thank you for your patience during this time, and the support being offered from many of you.
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Cierto, si pensaramos un poco, solamente estamos con este desastre por culpa de las consolas. Bethesda le paga a Nexus para este ridícula e innecesario movimiento?
Maybe you should cry death (I mean figuratively) to whiners.
Google tranlate
maybe I am just blind.
You can still use the manager to INSTALL the mod, you just have to download the file manually and drag it into the mod manager.
I have SE, NMM, Loot, Wrye and a box of Alphabits in case I need more letters.
Loot seems to be doing things pretty well for a new game, although it did default to standard Skyrim a couple times even though I have uninstalled it. That's ok. The problem is NMM and WRYE both ignore the Loot load order changes. I know Loot is working because each test load I check the mods catagory in-game and the order is true to Loot not to Wrye/NMM.
So the question is [tangent here, WRYE LOCK ORDER is off, no select icon} why do the other two files not see the new order. Is there a lock order in NMM that I can't see. The game is fine but obviously Bashed Patch is going to be funky if it's working off a separate load order than the game.
Wrye is run from within the NMM enviornment.
Thx
If it's a money issue I understand, but since your servers are sort of the most important thing that you currently own when it comes to maintaining your services. Logically that is where your priorities should lie.
That's how I think it works at least, please correct me if i'm wrong.
Edit: Also totally offtopic but a delete button for comments would be awesome.
Short version: Anything we put on the internet becomes the internet's property, posts included.
Edit: Then again there's an edit button and that's pretty close.
Is there or are there things we can do to help you with the coding/code (stuff even I the IT in the IT Crowd don't comprehend)?
I am a bit out of touch with torrenting these days but I do know Blizzard still uses a similar process for downloading. I may be in left field on that, but it could alleviate the overload....no wait I am in left field.
sighs, one moment you think you know what's going on and then the internet waves as it goes happily by.
Anyway, if we can help, drop us a line.
Thanks.
The code hasn't worked for many years. We had stability issues until we sorted our database cluster out in 2015, something you wouldn't know as you only joined the site 2 weeks ago. Our code and cluster has never been tested with this much traffic before. We're currently seeing a 50% increase in traffic on our previous highest traffic time (FO4 launch) and a sustained 75% increase on our normal traffic conditions. We're up from 11,000 active users a second to 19,200 active users a second.
We have 13 cloud-based VMs with a total of 104 CPU cores and 320GB of RAM serving the site front-end. A database cluster of 5 dedicated servers with a combined total of 160 CPU cores and 960GB of RAM (yes, 960GB of memory) handling database operations. And almost all our files are served via a global CDN that's currently pushing an average of 15 Gbit a second (and is burstable to 100Git+). That's not even mentioning the multiple firewalls, DDoS protection, load balancers and so on and so forth that we utilise.
So when I say it's a code issue, it's a code issue. Don't try and call me on it when I obviously know a lot more about it.
RE: any bandwidth errors you may or may not have seen, our load balancers were capped at 300mbit/sec on our end, mainly to ensure we don't send more traffic to the VMs and cluster than they could handle. We've since upped that cap to 500mb/sec. That's completely unrelated to our CDN and file serving.
wow, I mean wow. that's impressive.
That was an awesome explanation. One day, I hope to be that smooth. I mostly just sit at my desk and ask them if they have turned it on and off again. Then tell them that they must have broken the internet and to call back tomorrow.
It's been over a fortnight since this news post.
Is Skyrim SE getting added to NMM? As it is, I can't see it in the list of games to detect. Is it due to be switched on or something?
I'm really, REALLY bad with computers - like caveman using an iPhone for the first time, bad! I need NMM to sort my mods and I cannot play SSE without Arthmoor's fantastic bug fixes or Cutting Room Floor.
I read that MO has been abandoned, so any thoughts on how I can safely (and within my noob level of comprehension) mod SSE to play?
Thanks for your time.
Oh I do make sure all my files are in order and that they're set up to install correctly. The only reason I use NMM for Morrowind is because I can't be assed to go and remove all the individual files from textures and meshes and what not. Too lazy. I liked the support. And I have the current version of NMM, there is no Morrowind. It's not on the list of games being scanned. :/
Either way, feel your pain on this one. Cheers, and hope my advice helps you or anyone else revisiting that masterpiece!
- E
Been modding a new Morrowind setup for the past 2 weeks, while waiting several months for the dust to settle in Skyrim mod country. I can confirm that 63.3 does in fact search for and find Morrowind - even if I had to manually point to the directory after a clean install. Seems to be working as intended.
Can not comment on the 63.6 version, as NMM crashes whenever I try to upgrade it, and the ability to log into the Nexus and download mods directly has been spotty at best for weeks now.
As to modding, many, if not most, of the best mods for Morrowind were not designed for NMM, with a lot of the recommended mods in S.T.E.P., BtB recommendations, and MSGO not even on the Nexus. My recommendation is to download your mods manually (yes, it kinda sucks with the connection issues right now), and repackage all but the ones with installers to work with NMM. This means 1. decompressing them, 2. make sure they are in the right order in terms of directories (e.g. you might decompress and just find an ESP, the texture/mesh folders, or even just a collection of texture files) - you may have to create a data, texture, or mesh folder within that to contain the mod, 3. use something like 7zip to re-archive, 4. and then send to NMM to install.
Considering that much of the best stuff I have come across are new textures or meshes, reading carefully about what order to install is key. Even S.T.E.P. is a little fuzzy on what works together, requires a patch, or which part of a mod to leave out. This method, although a pain up front, saved me massive headaches in terms of resolving conflicts by easily allowing me to back out one mod at a time, see the impact, and reinstall as needed.
Sorry for the off topic advice, and hope I answered your question. Honestly wish I knew this stuff when I started a few weeks ago!
- E