Myrgard

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that after the last big update there have been a few issues with the metaserver... this isn't entirely unexpected since it was a big update, but I want to keep everyone in the loop.

1) Metaserver crashes. These have been happening every few days and unfortunately there has been very little debug information so it's hard to track down exactly what is going on. That said, I think I've managed to piece together a likely culprit and have implemented a fix that I'll push live tonight after the majority of folks are done playing. Sorry for the inconvenience but hopefully the update will move things back into the robust/stable scenario that you are used to.

2) Chat "freezing" on clients. This one is similarly mysterious. I've determined that when it happens the clients are still able to *send* packets (i.e. you can still talk and other people see it, but you see no updates yourself). In some cases certain packets seem to be received still too (i.e. you can view other people's stats). I'm still a ways from solving this one since it is quite hard to reproduce on demand and in a situation where I can attach a debugger, etc. but in the meantime if it happens to you changing rooms will fix the issue. Again, apologies for the problem and I'm doing what I can to track it down. If people find a way to reproduce it easily/reliably please let me know. The best I've got so far is to basically leave a client idling for hours in the lobby where folks are playing, which isn't exactly great for iteration time and makes it hard to debug server-side issues since by necessity this is done on the live server.

Anyways, just wanted to keep folks in the loop. If there are other issues that you know of (particularly since the update) please post here and let me know.

Update: server seems to be stable since I pushed the update to fix the metaserver crashes. Time will tell.

Secondarily I've been idling in the lobby for a few days now and haven't had my chat freeze since the update. Not sure if I'm just lucky or if that issue was somehow related to the first. Please let me know if you guys get any chat freezes going forward and ideally the circumstances surrounding them.

I've noticed a few times that I've been waiting for a game to open... then after a while begin to suspect something is wrong... then leave and come back and the next game had already started.

adrenaline wrote:I've noticed a few times that I've been waiting for a game to open... then after a while begin to suspect something is wrong... then leave and come back and the next game had already started.

A thousand times. For the times I have my lobby-watcher account on, too, the lobbies won't be in sync; i.e. time remaining on a game is different.

So when this happens can you guys try and see if you can do various things like view a player's stats, join a game, etc? The symptoms are a bit weird the few times I was able to reproduce it in the past with some packets seeming to get through fine while others being ignored (or not sent).

Also how recently has this been happening? Has it decreased in frequency since the 2014-05-19 update? Before that update I was able to reproduce it by just idling for a few hours in the lobby whereas now I can often idle a client for days and still not run into the issue. If you guys have a reliable way to trigger it and/or any info you can add about what happens when it occurs that would be helpful in trying to track down the issue, wherever it may be.

I haven't hosted as much since TWS wrapped, but on MWC weekends I'll definitely have more chances to see if this is still an issue.

Cool, just try to gather as much info on what the 'state' of the game is if it does happen before you change rooms, etc. (which generally fixes it). Also please note the date/time if possible.