The Sociologist wrote::cry: I experienced really severe lag Monday and Tuesday, I'm afraid. Tuesday was the worst and I was unable to play even in the slot I've been using recently, which is a bit later than peak time in Europe. Unable to join the game at all. So it's spreading.
One of the many changes made was to reduce a large daily statistical report to a top line summary, with the full report only run every 14 days - Tuesday was the day it ran as a full report - In itself it doesn't impact too strongly but when other background processes run and compete with this then things begin to slow down - subsequent regular background processes start to run - all slowing the system further ... couple this with the main peak time activity and the lag begins to build .
We have moved as many processes to different quieter times of the day as possible but key processes such as projects, travel , sailing, turn progression need to be run at fixed intervals . Many processes have also been optimised - moving load from known bottlenecks - some have been deliberately slowed down , so they release resources more often for other processes/
Unfortunately another contributor to the lag is the users themselves ... who often , quite rightly lose patience with a page waiting to load and attempt to reload it again ... this unfortunately can create a 2nd process in the queue without killing the earlier process which now has wait to time - creating yet more lag. I can understand why people do that , but it doesn't help.
There are other more fundamental/structural changes we are investigating but these will take awhile to research, test and implement.
