LG has become very slow

Hi - does this happen to someone else too? The connecting and sending times have become very slow from two connections, often more than one minute for every information in a game (select move; send move).

Yes, it was that slow for me then, too. It's gotten better since. That happens sometimes.

I wonder how heavily the speed of LG is affected by the various AI's?

Do these programs run on the LG server, or access LG remotely? If they communicate via the web interface then they could be responsible for the slowdown.

The programs would have to check both their position in any games they are playing, and whether any new games have started, both on a regular basis (once every minute for 24hrs/day maybe?).

Chris

There aren't all that many AIs, and we humans are cheking our games, too. I don't think that's it.

There aren't all that many AIs, and we humans are cheking our geames, too. I don't think that's it.

Suppose an AI checks for new games once a minute, 24 hours a day.

So it will check 30 * 24 = 720 times per day.

It's possible that an AI would also check on each of it's current games at the same frequency. Suppose it is playing 10 games. That's another 30 * 24 * 10 = 7200 accesses.

So in total this single theoretical AI would access the site nearly 8000 times per day.

There are three AI's I'm aware of - that's 24,000 accesses. I believe the figure may be within an order of magnitude of the total number of human accesses.

All these figures are just guesstimates. I haven't seen the code for these AIs, and don't have access to server logs. I'm just wondering if this may be a possible cause and whether it would be worth looking in to.

My "AI", gwg_robot, can indeed be quite slow, but I run it on my own PC. I think the football AI is similar.

A few weeks ago I had a big problem with accessing LG from my computer at home in Korea.( I teach English in Korea) I had to visit pc cafes and play from work. About two weeks later the problems disappeared, though in the last few day LG has started getting a little clunky. Maybe it's coincidence but I could not access www.ihug.co.nz during the time I could not use LG. I had no problems with other internet locations. I do not know what www.ihug.co.nz and LG may have in common but perhaps it can offer some one a handle on the problem.

I don't know about AI so much, but i only know that i've found that day to day, sometimes the server seems slow. this morning (11 am pacific time) I kept getting evil red error messages, and it was next to impossible to log on with DSL...

AI Owners: Do you ocheck your current games by number, or do you use the next-game features? If' you're constantly checking each game individually (which isn't what I'd guess), that could be a burden on the server.

I can't answer for the other AIs, but here is how I use gwg_robot.

I connect, manually, a few times each day. I use "next game" to view a position. I type the position manually into the AI. The AI returns its move in the form of an argument-string, e.g. "&move=aebecdcccbdaeax". I paste this into my browser. Thus the AI makes less demand on the server than a human player who enters his move letter-by-letter.

By the way - what I have been noticing recently is not an access problem, it is a server problem. Access to the server has been excellent, with a ping time of around 80 mS. It's just that the server isn't doing what it is meant to do.

It doesn't matter if AI is on your computer. It sends mednads to server to make www page with game and send to yopur computer... So..

i think I t should be limit of daily use od LG ( if it is problem with AI - what now is makeing with slow down of server) - for instance 120 games * 2 moves * 3 pages =720. I think a limit of 1000-2000 acceses to server should be enough for human. And Ai should check its moves not so often - but rather , let say, once a hour.

The Dvonn AI program of Jan de Graaf is operated by hand. Jan checks for games in which his program has moves to make, has the program calculate the moves and enters them by hand. It being a computer program playing therefore does not cause any other load than a human playing.

So there is AI for GWG, DVONN,soccer, Amazons.... What else?:)

May be there are more computers than people:)))?

I do not know anything about the "behind the scenes" of a computer program but I do know sometimes I can play very fast on LG and other times I want to throw my computer out the window. Alot of times I have to just close it down and forget about it for a while.

My AI (the streetsoccer loco_ai program) checks once per about 90 seconds if there are games. It does that the same way you do: click on 'your games' and see if there are any games where it is your turn. It checks that list and then plays the games where it's its turn. So it does NOT check each game every time, just the list. I really can't imagine that would be the cause of the slowness.

Sometimes it's very slow (quite often) and sometimes it works well. More people playing, the server slows down. People go to bed, server speeds up :).

If players register membership, and pay the fee, maybe the webmaster will buy more servers and internet bandwidth.

Without money and/or adds, he can't do much (except if he's a rich guy trying to spend his money :)

I am the author of the Amazons AI Molpadia. I operate it completely manually during perhaps one or two hours every day.

I am thinking of adding automatic moving, but in that case I think that polling once every hour would be enough.

bump

My script keeps crashing because, I think, of slow response times. Are others experiencing occasional very slow responses?

I had those problems long ago, although it was more to do with my Internet connection dropping out. I have a Python script that handles the work, and I run it in a bash script like this: while 1; do python go.py; sleep 60; done so if the Python script crashes one time, it will keep running. (go.py sleeps for a while itself; the 60 is just some extra time.) I also had a weird problem that when the script tried to load a page, sometimes it would hang forever (again, it was probably my Internet). I solved this by starting a second thread in the script that sleeps for an hour and then ends the program. This way it will never be stalled for more than an hour.

I like you bash script idea to loop on my other script. Thanks!

Still, has nobody else noticed occasional slow responses? Maybe it is just MY connection....

It does seem to be slow now and then for me (that's even when other websites are loading normally, so I'm guessing the problem is on LG's end).

I actually neglected to say the real reason I have the extra sleep in my example up there; it's pretty important. If the site or your Internet connection goes down, when you request a page from the server, the call might fail immediately and crash the script. Without the sleep, the computer will sit there spawning processes constantly, consuming CPU time needlessly. (Another way this behavior happens is if you have a syntax error in your script; in Python at least, this causes it to fail immediately. That caused me some problems once, when I edited the script badly and then the CPU usage shot up to 100%!)

yes, it's been slow the last month or so for me.

LG has been very sluggish the last several days. Is it just my computer?

agree, slow.

its one of the signs...of the end

one question would be, do you script guys keep the connection open all the time? if so, thats considered bad because you permanently keep one connection from the server blocked.
maybe the server admin could have a look at the log files or the connection pool and see what that does.
ciao
Ralf

Web hosts close an http connection if it's not used for a while (see the Keep-alive header value), typically 5 minutes.

Very slow again....I can make about two einstein moves per minute

I would have replied sooner, but LG is ... never mind.