Factorio Forums

I've noticed this issue a small fraction of the time when applying server modpack updates, and finally got around to making a report.

It's possible for the Factorio client when joining a multiplayer server to not understand that the newest version of a recently updated mod on the mod portal is able to be downloaded, and this to persist for much longer than the relatively short caching experience by the in-game mod browser.

As you can see in the screenshots below, 'No release' is obtained when joining the server (pictured), despite the v1.0.2 zip that is on the server (pictured) being available on both the mod portal website (pictured) and the ingame mod browser on the same client (not pictured). Unfortunately I lost the session log for this situation and was unable to reproduce it to obtain one.

It seems to happen after repeatedly updating the same mod on the server. When it occurs, it occurs for all users simultaneously — they all see 'No Release' and have to download that mod by other means. It seems to resolve by waiting, If I have to guess I'd say it resolves in 15 minutes, which is long enough to cause pain for large servers doing repeated hotfixes in a row.

(Note in passing: to obtain the 'No Release' error screenshot I had to scroll a long way down. It would be better to put the erroring mods at the top of the list.)

The mod portal uses a CDN so I would hazard a guess that this is probably just caused by a stale edge cache. Don't update your mod multiple times in the span of minutes I guess.

I wouldn’t expect an edge cache to be stale for all connecting users at once, unless users are getting poisoned.

The problem with “don’t do that” is when there’s a large server being hotfixed, repeated updates of the same mod are exactly the ones that are most valuable for the mod portal service to provide in a timely manner that day.

If all users just recently downloaded the mod then yeah, it would make sense for all (relevant) edge caches to be stale simultaneously. I guess I can see how you would need to iteratively test a mod like this if it requires a bunch of players to do so.

In any case, the solution for this on Wube's side would be to use the CDN's API (if available) to tell it to invalidate all URLs associated with the mod whenever an new version is uploaded. It seems like they are not doing that and simply rely on the expiration timer.

Good point. Yes I think all relevant users had recently downloaded the first attempt at the hotfix. Of course the ideal is to test everything locally, but with ongoing live events more can happen.