When I am playing, at exactly 11 pm and also at midnight (Central Standard Time) this site freezes on me for 5 minutes. Last night I lost a game partly due to that. I lost 5 minutes of my time and so I ran out of time before making all of my moves. I wonder, is anyone else having this problem? I wonder what's going on to cause this every day.

I have noticed this also.  It seems every night at 10pm local time (5am UTC) I cannot play games or even get to the forum for about 5-10 minutes.

I have recently played RT games at this time and can confirm that it affects play and sometimes outcomes of games. Ideally, the timers would be suspended during whatever maintenance is occurring.

Yes, suspending the timers on games being played would be the answer...I guess.

charlesdale wrote:

Yes, suspending the timers on games being played would be the answer...I guess.

OKay, the true ideal is to spread out the maintenance or whatever it is causing this so that it's invisible to the user. But if that's technically difficult, suspend the timers and tell the users that the site will be running smoothly again in approximately 5 minutes.

There's some big load spikes coming in at odd times of the day which I'm trying to work out the reason for... it's not always at the same time and it's not game related so I can't schedule around it. I'll keep looking into it.

tom wrote:

t's not always at the same time

FYI - This event at least seems to always be at the same time.  There may be other load spikes (in fact I do notice sometimes the UI is laggy at "random" times), and this event may not be related to load, but every time I am on at 5am UTC there is ~5 minutes of no-connectivity.

Now, I can't remember if this event changed with our local time change.  I know it always happens at 10am local time (i.e. 5am utc), but I feel like it also happened at 10am local time back before the daylight savings time change (which would have been 4am UTC).

Anyone else remember if this was going on when USA was in daylight savings?  And if it was happening at the same time then?

Ozyman wrote:

tom wrote:

t's not always at the same time

FYI - This event at least seems to always be at the same time.  There may be other load spikes (in fact I do notice sometimes the UI is laggy at "random" times), and this event may not be related to load, but every time I am on at 5am UTC there is ~5 minutes of no-connectivity.

 

Now, I can't remember if this event changed with our local time change.  I know it always happens at 10am local time (i.e. 5am utc), but I feel like it also happened at 10am local time back before the daylight savings time change (which would have been 4am UTC).

 

Anyone else remember if this was going on when USA was in daylight savings?  And if it was happening at the same time then?

Ah well 5am UTC is a different matter - it's the time of the daily database backup. It has to happen daily and 5am UTC was about the quietest time of the day I could find.

By the way, Tom, thanks for the games. You're doing a great job and I appreciate it.