Conquer Club

The website has slowed to a crawl today. I have a 7Mbit connection and I've tested repeatedly to ensure it isn't on my end. It is taking as long as a minute to "roll the dice" now.

I suspect the programmers have given up on the pseudo-random dice file and instead are running a pseudo-random number generator, or if the dice file is on a separate site, that is the problem.

Yep, working slow for me too and mine is a 2mbps connection.

It's not a bandwidth issue since the site is hosted on a server farm that has a nice wide highway (or so we are told).

The dice rolls are routed to random.org (again, so we are told), which does create routing lag. This is clearly evident as you play.

The rest of the lag comes from application limitations. The page refresh rates on this site are mind-boggling. The database application is topped out.

I don't think there is anything that can be done.

Except perhaps to restrict the site to premium only and launch a clone for new players/non-premium.

The difficult part would be to rationalize the database between the clones. It might not be do-able in this format.

In other words the site could be cloned butyou wouldn't be able to carry your rating and history between clones.

It's a tough problem which I am sure site management is working on feverishly to come up with a solution.

We may be stuck with what we have.

your talking gibberish....its not usually as slow as it is today!!!

But yes i am sure lack and CC is aware of it and they wil lsolve the issue in the near future!!

Does any1 know how you can tell if your internet is working to the maxmium that you have paid for?

hulmey wrote:your talking gibberish....its not usually as slow as it is today!!!

...

Sorry...too many years in systems engineering. As you say, I am sure lack and company will continue to work on the problem.

BTW, when I posted this question my machine NEVER CAME BACK to CC. I assumed the question went to the big bit bucket in the sky. I'm glad to see it was answered about a day later.

As to other performance issues, I have some expertise in this area, I used to work for Verio back when they were new and for an ISP before that, so am familiar with server farms, routers, bandwidth optimizers etc.

It is still a limitation to go offsite for "random dice", not to mention that as requests go offsite in a non-linear manner, even to a random file, the "randomness" disappears. Far better to generate the table store it locally and pick from that. Even if the table were sequential, as thousands of users "pick" the next number the net effect would be randomizing the sequential table, making it pseudo-random, at least as good as we have now. It is a relatively trivial program to define arrays of ALL possible dice scenarios for 3v2 and 3v1 rolls as well as 2v2 and even 2v1. In the old days this was an issue, but with today's memory, this is just a middling sized array. I could upload some C code to do just this in a week or so, depending on my time.

Lately I've found I have a big time sink, it is a game called CC....

My understanding is that CC downloads 500,000 lines of 5 dice rolls in a single file and reads them sequentially until a new file is needed, at which time one is taken from random.org. There is no separate access to random.org with each die roll or each attack.