Cantr II is not currently available. How bad is it?

[sky]

Lately the lag is so bad I have had times where I CAN NOT play / CAN NOT log on, CAN NOT get to cantr home page, MAJOR DELAY to get to character page if log on is possible.

Why are we adding new 'things' or new animal objects or new features to the game when this lag causes us NOT to beable to play?

I have experienced lag at all various times - if someone wants I can keep track of those times and then someone can investigate.

Just why why why are we creating new things? We really should be focussing on resolving the lag issue first.

I'm sorry but it is so frustrating as a player not to be able to play.
My time is limited as it is and when I do have time it seems to never fail - I can't log on, can't get to the home page or there is such a delay minutes are eaten up fast by the lag, etc.

I realize we want to improve features and add new awesome things to the game but PLEASE not at the cost of loosing more players or adding more lag. Lately I'm so frustrated the thought of just quitting has come to mind...yes quitting.

At the rate that the lag has been especially of late cantr will die fast. Players that still remain will likely have the same thouhts - what is the point of playing when I can't get into the game or play at a reasonable pace.

I am willing to help if I can just don't know how... I don't want to complain I'd like to find a solution and be willing to try to be part of that solution.

[Phalynx]

Lag seems particularly bad at the moment, to the extent that putting in ten minutes to the game here and there, which I would normally do, is simply not possible as in that time I often can't even access one character.

I too would rather be part of the solution than whine about it, but can't see that there is much I can do...

[psymann]

It would be great if I could help with ideas to reduce the lag, but I don't know what causes it, and hence I don't know how to reduce it.

All I can say to help, I suppose, is:

1) I'd be happy to lose this forum and move to a new one if that would help the lag.

2) I'd be happy to have a three-month period where there was not one single addition of any good idea (ie no new clothes, animals, objects, islands etc) if that would free-up those with the ability needed to deal with the lag.

There are days when the lag is really bad, and days when it's slightly bad. I have *never*, in my year playing Cantr, logged in to the game and found it fast. I believe that anyone who says the lag is "fixed" just means that it's no longer really bad, and has returned to being only slightly bad. It's a shame that their expectations have dropped to that level.

Aside from Cantr, I mainly play War of Empires (www.warofempires.com) and battlemaster (www.battlemaster.org). In comparison to these two games, Cantr on a really good day is still very noticeably slower than those two games on a bad day. I don't know whether it's worth contacting the makers of those games to see what they do differently, if anything? I know the guy in War of Empires spent a fair bit of time re-coding bits of the game to make it run faster a year ago.

So sorry I can't help, but at least I don't pretend to know what's wrong and accuse the staff of failing to address it - I think it's sad when people have been doing that.

All I can say is good luck to the staff for fixing it, and if fixing it means that nothing else good happens to the game for a few months, then I'd prefer that to another year of the slow page-loads.

psymann

[sky]

There seems to be NO LAG tonight....not complaining at all just
hope I don't jinx it now...

Okay so if we truly do not have lag tonight, then what is the difference between today and yesterday Tonight I was logging in between 8 and 9:30pm PST with out any delay or problem.

[ichi]

Sky wrote:
>
> There seems to be NO LAG tonight.

Yes, I too noticed a brief period without lag, but a few hours before that the lag was so bad that production and ship movement were not processed (projects and ships are now one step behind where they should be).

I was online then (expecting a ship to dock), and I got a lag of two minutes with only 22 people playing. I subequently tried to go to this forum but couldn't get in (probably because of the same lag).

[sky]

Seems things changed around 11:30 pm PST or so. Forum was unavailable as was the game. Finally got access about 45 mins later.

So I stand corrected - lag yes but didn't experience much in the evening like the past days. Can't say what it was like in the afternoon since I'm at work at that time - probably not a good thing to play cantr at work.

[Phalynx]

Yeah we could lose the off topic forums, possibly even the general discussion. They could be hosted elsewhere...

[Chris]

:shock:
There seems to be NO LAG tonight....not complaining at all just
hope I don't jinx it now...

Okay so if we truly do not have lag tonight, then what is the difference between today and yesterday Tonight I was logging in between 8 and 9:30pm PST with out any delay or problem.

The lag can vary minute by minute. Response time can seem good, I will pause work on a project to move around or drag stuff, and then lag hits. Missing a project tick isn't a huge deal, but if lag screws up a combat situation, I would be annoyed.

[Phalynx]

The game is sadly becoming unviable for me to play....

[I_am]

...but if lag screws up a combat situation, I would be annoyed.

Recently, I had a character get killed during a lag. I’ve no doubt she was destined to die and I’m not blaming the lag for it. But she was awake at the time of her death and there were some things I would have had her do or say if I could have gotten past the lag: like try to save the life of another character, who was also killed during the lag. At least she would have had a bigger last hurrah. Instead I hit enter only to see:

You cannot play a dead character (or something like that).

[Talimn]

Somehow, it seems to be becoming better for me. I have trouble a couple of times in the morning and somewhat frequently at night, but it seems to clear up in almost 5 minutes or so. Unless it's Friday night. There is almost no getting in for me then unless I wait till the early morning hours, and even then it's like molasses.

I still say it's better than it was two months ago. I could only log in something like 3 times a day. That's impossible for me to work with. Luckily, I have only had limited bugs with the auto-refresh recently, and nothing that didn't go away as soon as I logged out and back in.

[Chris]

I saw a strange kind of lag last night. Pages would partially load. Sometimes a couple of graphics would be missing; I could read the text, but the page was still loading. Other times, the page would be blank and finished loading. Then I would reload (which I generally don't do, but this was an unusual situation), and the page would appear almost instantly.

[psymann]

I post this here in case it is of use to anyone. We've been having a discussion in the War of Empires forum about whether PHP is quick or not compared to JAVA. Someone said that PHP was slow and any site written in PHP would be much slower than one written in JAVA. War of Empires (WOE) is written in JAVA, but this is what the game designer said about language and speed:

I don't think the speed of WOE has anything to do with Java versus PHP. WOE was a big slow beast at one point, and here is what I did to improve the speed. You will notice that nothing involved Java coding:
1. Improved the indices on the tables. A good index can speed things up tons.
2. Redesigned a lot of my database tables so that they were smarter and information was stored in fewer tables so less querying was performed.
3. Reconfigured the database tables to only be sized for the information that was being stored. For instance, if the only values I am storing in a field is 1 or 0, there is no need for the field to be an integer field. A tinyint field is just as good, except smaller.
4. Read up on MySQL documentation to figure out who to tune the database to speed up queries and cache results more.
5. Went through all my queries to make sure I removed all the "select *" queries where not needed. Now I just retrieve what I need.
6. Changed the page layout of WOE to use more divs and less tables. I found out that many times pages were waiting for the ads to load, and since the ads were part of the main layout table, the whole page had to wait. Once I split the page layout into 3 divs, everything sped up immensely. Now the left nav div, and the main content div can load even though the right side div that contains the ads might not be loaded yet.

So the above changes are what make WOE fast. I can remember the early days when I didn't have these fixes in. WOE was incredibly slow and I was banging my head and cursing Java like no tomorrow. I was even thinking of converting everything into PHP at that point because I had heard that PHP was such a quick language. (I even think I had some preliminary discussions with Esopo about it back then.) So the moral of the story is that if you speed up your database, your will most likely speed up your site, no matter what language your site is coded in.

He codes the whole game on his own with practically no help at all, so none of these are likely to have taken large amounts of time. The game is a little smaller than Cantr, but not by much (you can see WoE ranked a couple of places below Cantr on the Ultimate Game Directory, though it's been above Cantr in the past).

So in case any of that is of use, I've just copied exactly what he wrote on the WoE forum just now.

psymann

[N-Aldwitch]

Trust me, there is absolutely zero chance the ProgD team would switch to Java.

[psymann]

N-Aldwitch, I think the point of what Bhaal was saying is that there was no need to switch to JAVA. The point was that all the stuff he did was no related to the choice of language. Read the post of his I've quoted, and the six points there. None of them were saying "switch to JAVA". And even the first line he wrote: "I don't think the speed of WOE has anything to do with Java versus PHP."

So you're agreeing with him, yet somehow I get the feeling you thought you were disagreeing...

psymann