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

[Racetyme]

More importantly, there is probably something causing lag we don't know about.

[Joshuamonkey]

Jos knows.

[Nick]

Apparently they don't know what the problem is exactly.
I haven't even heard for sure what the bottleneck is; it may be bandwidth, but it also may be disk i/o related to SQL reads, or a lot of other things (maybe just some new, poorly written code). And it's not impossible that Cantr has been compromised to serve somebody else's needs in addition to our own...
Cantr needs to be more open with what hardware they're running and how much they're paying for that; you may be better of finding a new provider, who knows. But peer review is always helpful.

[Frits]

I noticed that lag between 6 and 12 PM GMT as well, it occurred every day of last week but not so much last sunday. Altho the lags are at intervals it's frustrating to try and really play, questions are left unanswered and chars end up in buildings when all they set out to do was get some tool. My guess it's some corporate dataflow interfering at set times.

At this hour though, it's trying to compete with lightning! Cantrtime 1805 4:25:29, 20 users active, 0.767 seconds taken, 347 queries executed (SQL took 0.610 seconds - 79.6%).

[Razorlance]

Yep, after 6pm GMT it's pretty much unplayable during the week for me, and that's ususally when I log on the most.

[Joshuamonkey]

When I get home for school is usually when it is unavailable... although during the last couple days I haven't been able to get on at all!!
Its either not available or way too slow, and I mean way.

[bmartes]

When I get this message, I would like to get a logoff button, if that is possible.
It stops my play-time and it stops server pressure
a real win-win situation...

Cheers.
B.

[SekoETC]

Your session will be reset when you log in the next time, meaning you won't lose any minutes even if you hadn't logged out. The only way you would lose minutes is refreshing the "Cantr is currently unavailable" page and continuing to play after it comes back up. If you go to some other site and return to Cantr through the login page, you won't lose any minutes. In fact Jos himself once said that the whole login button is pointless and could be removed, because the same effect is acquired through closing the window.

[The Sociologist]

To answer the thread question once more, I got "phpBB : Critical Error Could not connect to the database" about three times even just trying to post this--so I'd guess there must be few players from the UK/Western Europe left who play only in the evenings. Born out by the fact that some excellent characters in New Xanth, who were most active in that time window, have been fast asleep for a long time now. Sombre, sad, but there it is.

[sem]

It does seem to have been particularly bad in the last few weeks, especially between 18:00-23:00 GMT.

[sammigurl61190]

It's not -that- bad, considering the number of players, the the load on the server. If the problem is wanted to be fixed enough, you all should donate, so Jos can upgrade the server mayhaps?

[Solfius]

depends what the issue is.

if it's process related then a bigger server may solve it, if it is disk input/output a bigger server won't help much.

My uninformed guess is it's disk I/O because of the amount of SQL queries the game has to run.

As far as I know, the best way to cope with that is to create a distributed system, which sounds complicated.

According to the public finance report on the player page, for the 5month period shown, Cantr was making money.

started 2006 with USD$1,191.02, over 5 months gained USD$1,614.43 and spent only $672.72, thus ending the 5 month period with USD$2,132.73

If money were required to fix the issue I doubt that it would be a problem based on those figures.

[Regis]

My uninformed guess is it's disk I/O because of the amount of SQL queries the game has to run.

Is whole Cantr working on one server only, or maybe it has a separate SQL server? And what about wiki and forum? Do they use the same SQL server (or server, in general, if there is no separate SQL server)?

[N-Aldwitch]

Regis, I believe the forums were switched to a new server.

Can I make a suggestion? Cantr splits it's databases into multiple servers, so that there isn't a bottleneck caused by players wanting to access the database, but have to wait in queue.

[Solfius]

Regis, I believe the forums were switched to a new server.

Can I make a suggestion? Cantr splits it's databases into multiple servers, so that there isn't a bottleneck caused by players wanting to access the database, but have to wait in queue.

*shudders*

My impression of distributed database systems is that they are very complicated,

Some of the cons:

# Complexity — extra work must be done by the DBAs to ensure that the distributed nature of the system is transparent. Extra work must also be done to maintain multiple disparate systems, instead of one big one. Extra database design work must also be done to account for the disconnected nature of the database — for example, joins become prohibitively expensive when performed across multiple systems.
# Economics — increased complexity and a more extensive infrastructure means extra labour costs.
# Security — remote database fragments must be secured, and they are not centralized so the remote sites must be secured as well. The infrastructure must also be secured (eg: by encrypting the network links between remote sites).
# Difficult to maintain integrity — in a distributed database enforcing integrity over a network may require too much networking resources to be feasible

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_database