online interruptions

[loafer]

I play every Sunday evening with three other players from widely spaced locations in North America. This evening, each of us, at different times, lost our connections mutiple times, and eventually we decided to terminate our evening of bridge. Is it possible that BBO is reaching a size limitation and can no longer support the amount of play which occurs at any given time?

[NickRW]

It is theoretically possible that the BBO servers have too much to do. However I tend to think that relatively unlikely:

 

1) It is not in BBO's interests to be in a position where this would happen with any frequency as people would go away.

 

2) You'd probably be able to diagnose (likely) server overload by the fact that not only do connections get dropped, but, responses would be painfully slow quite a lot of the time even when you are connected.

 

Most of my connection problems come from the network side on this laptop - sometimes the thing needs to be "repaired" as it says on the button - I guess that actually means the network card gets rebooted. Sometimes the router needs to be rebooted (rare) and sometimes it appears that my ISP is overloaded as the network at home is OK, and I can ping any outside server I want to - but html connections don't work - yet without rebooting anything they start working a bit later.

 

Nick

[fred]

The server infrastructure we have in place scales well - when the # of people logged in to BBO becomes "too much" for our servers to handle, it is relatively easy for us to solve the problem by adding additional machines.

 

One day the time may come in which we hit some kind of a brick wall, but as far as we can tell we are not even close to being at that point now.

 

Whatever happened to you and your friends was not caused by there being too many people on BBO for our servers to handle. I can say this with confidence because you report that your game took place during the evening North America which is not even close to being our peak time each day. Probably there were no more than 7000 or so people online during the time in question and it is not unusual for there to be more than twice this number online during peak times.

 

Almost certainly the cause of the problem you describe was a random glitch either at our ISP or (more likely) somewhere else on the Internet. These things happen from time to time and really there is not much we can do about it. Fortunately it is the case that such problems invariably resolve themselves within an hour or so.

 

Nick is correct that we spend a lot of time and money to ensure that performance is always good. But it is the nature of the beast (the Internet) that periods of instability will happen on occasion.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[pigpenz]

maybe its related to the DNS hole that they are still working to fix up( ips's) it was discovered by Dan Kaminsky...so for more info do a google on him.

[barmar]

maybe its related to the DNS hole that they are still working to fix up( ips's) it was discovered by Dan Kaminsky...so for more info do a google on him.

Seems unlikely. Once the server connection is made, there's little need to do DNS lookups.

[TimG]

Whatever happened to you and your friends was not caused by there being too many people on BBO for our servers to handle. I can say this with confidence because you report that your game took place during the evening North America which is not even close to being our peak time each day. Probably there were no more than 7000 or so people online during the time in question and it is not unusual for there to be more than twice this number online during peak times.

Would the vugraph of the final match of the Spingold make a difference to the number of people online on a Sunday evening in North America?

[fred]

Whatever happened to you and your friends was not caused by there being too many people on BBO for our servers to handle. I can say this with confidence because you report that your game took place during the evening North America which is not even close to being our peak time each day. Probably there were no more than 7000 or so people online during the time in question and it is not unusual for there to be more than twice this number online during peak times.

Would the vugraph of the final match of the Spingold make a difference to the number of people online on a Sunday evening in North America?

Yes, but only an extra 1000 at the most versus a "normal" Sunday evening.

 

Our peak load on Sunday was about 14,500 simultaneous logins. This took place when it was roughly 1:30 in the Pacific Time Zone (and 4:30 in the Eastern Time Zone). By about 2 hours later there were less than 10,000 people logged in.

 

For the past 5+ years Sunday has consistently been our most busy day of the week and July has consistently been our least busy month of the year.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[jocdelevat]

Hapend to me the same thing yesterday(Monday). I got disconected 3 times and the screen came up with be sure you are connected to the internet. I checked and internet was ok. I could login to bbo flash but not to the win client. One thing I want to point is happend only on vista pc and usually triger if you want to browse (while break or pard declerer) the internet with IE7. Anyhow I had some problems with my ISP recently so I do not know from where it comes.