Board Game Arena

Due to (another) maintenance operation, the service will be unavailable during approximately 1 hour today.

This is the second maintenance this week (we did another on Monday). Some words of explanation about this:

This week, we are doing a major upgrade of the BGA realtime server. This server is the one that allow you to see realtime updates on BGA. For example, when you play a move or create a table, the other players must see this immediately: this is the role of the realtime server.

During last summer, we found out that our existing realtime server was having difficulties to handle the growing traffic on BGA, causing red errors "TIMEOUT with notification service" you may have seen.

To fix this, we decided to do a hardware upgrade AND a software upgrade.

Each of these upgrades needs to stop all realtime games in progress. We could do it without this, but the risk is way too big to loose all tables in progress, so we prefer to secure the upgrade. Waiting for all realtimes table to finish takes approximately 1 hour, so the expected maintenance time is approximately 1 hour (to wait for realtime games in progress) + 30 minutes (maintenance time).

Unfortunately the safest way to do this upgrade required 2 distinct maintenance operation: the hardware upgrade was done on Monday, and the software upgrade will be done today.

Hopefully, if everything goes fine, we won't need another upgrade. We can't be 100% sure because changing things may break things: some of you may have experienced a crash yesterday due to the first upgrade The good news is that the hardware update has already increased the realtime server reactivity by at least 20%.

We're sorry for the inconvenience cause by all these heavy operations. Fortunately, as the new server can handle 4x more traffic than the old one, we hope that we won't have to upgrade it again in the near future.

Thanks for your loyalty to BGA and for playing here.

Thanks for making the site better

When exactly are you doing the maintenance? Today is a very broad term

Maintenance is over now, but we are still monitoring everything to check if everything is fine.

anlaszpen wrote: ↑30 October 2019, 11:30 Thanks for making the site better

agree

anlaszpen wrote: ↑30 October 2019, 11:30 Thanks for making the site better

+1

Yeah, thanks but...is the "you are disconnected for inactivity" message is temporary or not? If not, is there an option to stay connected? I mean...when you keep your page open and are waiting for the rotating triangle "yeah! it's my turn, let's take a break and play"...you don't know you are disconnected and when you check, you notice it's your turn in 24865 games.

DonkeyKONG wrote: ↑02 November 2019, 19:05 is the "you are disconnected for inactivity" message is temporary or not?

It is not. We found out that >50% of our realtime server traffic was from "inactive players" browser. That is to say that the majority of the bandwidth was consumed by players who are not active on the website for hours, and frequently for days.

To fix this, we are now disconnecting you after 1 hour without any activity on BGA (no click, no mouse move, nothing). A simple click allows you to reconnect to the service again. We may increase this time in the future if needed, but we definitely need a limit.

Even if I understand...wouldn't be a good idea to remove that limitation for premium members? Maybe it would be a good reason for some to subscribe?