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        Arimaa >> Site Discussion >> Does this site crash for everyone... or just me?
        
(Message started by: JigglyPuff on Sep 25th, 2009, 8:22am)
Title: Does this site crash for everyone... or just me?
Post by JigglyPuff on Sep 25th, 2009, 8:22am
I've been trying to log on pretty much every day to build my skills here, but I've been experiencing some nagging crashes.  
It doesn't fail... after one game, maybe two, I can't get back on the site.  It'll keep loading forever.  I can't access the game room, or the forums, or even the home page.  
Now, maybe it's just the time I'm on, and the place is swamped with visitors, so I'm wondering if everyone is experiencing this.  Are there times when the site won't load for you,  or is this something on my end?  
I've had this problem going back weeks, and I figured I'd just wait it out... but nope, still happening.  
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Fritzlein on Sep 25th, 2009, 8:52am
A couple of times in the past month, I couldn't open a game or log in to the game room or even edit the Twiki.  It has always cleared up in a few minutes, though, and when I do get through there seem to be people logged in, playing games, having fun, so I know the site didn't completely crash.  That would suggest it was network-related, rather than load-related.  On the other hand, given the recent influx of new players, one would suspect it was load-related rather than network-related.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by qswanger on Sep 25th, 2009, 8:57am
I have been getting on in the evenings (EST) the last several days. Last night was fine, but the night before last it was just awful. I was playing a bot-ladder game and everytime I tried submitting my move it would not seem to do anything. After refreshing and redoing (or just waiting it out) it would eventually submit my move, but only after a *minimum* lag of one minute! I lost that game, I believe, not because of any undue bad play on my part, but because of my need to rush my moves in fear that I would lose on time. Ultimately I lost not by time, but after a series of blunders that I feel I could have avoided if not for these lag issues.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by JigglyPuff on Sep 25th, 2009, 8:15pm
Only reason I ask is because it's been happening pretty consistently lately.  I wouldn't mention it if it were a rare thing, but it happened again today at some point after I made the post.
I played a game, and couldn't get back on.  I backed out and tried to reload the page through one of my bookmarks with no luck.
After waiting about 20 minutes, with no problems loading other sites, I closed all of my windows, opened my internet connection again, and tried some more.
Finally, later in the afternoon, after I had rebooted my computer, I was able to get back on.
It's happening just about every day now, so I'm trying to figure what's up.   :(
If it's because of new players pouring in, I guess that's good.   ;D
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by qswanger on Sep 26th, 2009, 9:30am
OK, I'm officially pissed off now. Sorry to be rude.

In just the last few minutes I was playing in a game against bot_Bomb2005P1 as per the next rung on the bot ladder. We were only nine moves into the game and I was holding my own against it (no pieces captured yet), playing in a very timely manner and not ever getting down to under one minute. There were only 4-5 players on the server at the time. As I wrote two posts up, I submitted my move (clicking several times) and the client just stood there not switching the clock over to the bot. My time went down into the negative numbers and I had thought that maybe it would eventually "wake up" and adjust the time properly. However, I got impatient, crossed my fingers, and hit the refresh button (as the screen said to do). That caused the game to go away and the next thing I know I see my game in the "recent games" list with the "*" next to the bot indicating it as the winner. That's two out of the last three bot games I played where there were significant time issues with either the bots or server. The last time was in the evening on a weekday and just now early on a Saturday afternoon. I don't think I can afford to play any more bot games until this problem has been resolved. Thank you.

--Quinn
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Fritzlein on Sep 27th, 2009, 5:16am
I feel your pain.  This sounds like an interface issue, not a load issue.  In 2004, when I first started playing Arimaa, I had so much trouble with losing games on time because of the interface that I almost quit Arimaa for good.  The inherent merits of the game hardly matter if playing it is so annoying.  I can't blame you if the collection of coping strategies we have doesn't seem like enough to make it worthwhile.  But, such as they are, here are some suggestions:

1) When you lose a game on time like that, choose "Unrate Game" under the "Play Now" menu from the menu list in the upper left.  That doesn't stop a timeout from being annoying, but it limits the damage to your rating.  You must take advantage of this feature before playing another game, or the option goes away.

2) When it doesn't appear that your move has been sent, or when a bot is taking longer than usual to move, try sending a short chat message.  Even against a human opponent I often chat a "." periodically, a home-made ping.

3) When there appears to be a problem, reload the client window earlier rather than later.  It stinks to lose the seconds on your clock from reloading, but at least you can play on.

4) Experiment with the different clients available under the "Settings" menu.  I have had the best luck with "Flash Client V2", but I believe Arimabuff can't get anything to work for him except "Flash Client V1".  Omar is now recommending "Flash Client V2 - HTTP", and also added a new option for "JavaScript Client".

5) Experiment with different browsers.  Until I got a faster connection, Internet Explorer worked better for me than Firefox.

My guess is that in the long term the connection issues won't be completely solved until a new server is built from the ground up along the lines of the Internet Chess Club, i.e. not Web based.  The arimaa.com game room was initially (in 2002) supposed to be a quick proof-of-concept, a temporary solution, but as more and more features got added, it became harder and harder to start over.  (From working at Yahoo, I have learned that nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.)

Of course it is up to you whether all the hassle is worth it.  I can't blame you if you walk away from arimaa.com, but I personally am very glad I didn't.  Omar has been providing this fun, free place to play for years, and has sunk tens of thousands of dollars into it.  Now, for the first time, he is starting to get a trickle of revenue from sales of Arimaa boxed sets, but the most likely scenario is that he never recoups his investment.  It's a labor of love.  If Omar does start making money, though, I predict we'll see a brand new, super-spiffy gameroom in the future.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by omar on Oct 7th, 2009, 6:10pm
I've also experienced the lag problem in some of my games lately. When I checked the load on the server it was really high. This year I am definitely going to have to turn off the bots during the event games.

The problem could be eased by getting another server and moving the bots overs to the new server. The gameroom activity can easily be handled by the current server if the bots were running on a different server. Right now I can't justify getting another server and I'll be lucky if the royalties from the set/book sales cover the current expense.

Another solution would be to have another site for playing Arimaa. I've asked some of the chess sites like chess.com and chesscube.com if they would like to add Arimaa to their site, but they aren't interested. I couldn't find the contact for FICS. The only one that was interested was igGameCenter.com. But the problem is other sites would only allow human-human games and would not be able to provide the bots that we have on arimaa.com. We are lucky to have all these bots on the arimaa.com site because the bot developers have agreed to allow their previous years bot to be run on arimaa.com for improving the next years bots and players. But since this is under the context of research I also cannot charge a subscription on arimaa.com even to cover expenses. I've considered asking for donations, but I'm afraid it won't be much, but better service will be expected. So for now it's just a free service provided on an as is basis. But I'm afraid it might get worse before it gets better and who knows how many potential players we'll lose.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 8th, 2009, 5:54am

on 10/07/09 at 18:10:02, omar wrote:
The problem could be eased by getting another server and moving the bots overs to the new server.

The problem could also be eased by offering only P1 and P2 bots for free, and having other bots be pay-per-use.  Human vs. human games could still be free.  Developers could still offer their bots, running on their own servers, to be free to play if they chose.  The computer science experiment that is Arimaa would not be hampered by this arrangement.

The reason I propose leaving the P1 and P2 bots available for free is that they bot ladder gives newer players an excellent introduction to the game, a try-before-you-buy experience.  By the time you have passed all those bots in the ladder, you are halfway through, and you know whether or not you are addicted.  But at the same time, these bots put a fraction of the load on the server that the fast and blitz bots do.  The benefit/price ratio is higher for the lower bots.

The reason I propose shutting off the blitz, fast, and CC bots is that we don't want to alienate new users by giving them a bad experience.  It is better to limit the experience and have it be positive than to try to accommodate everyone and give a mediocre or negative experience.  We don't want to alienate new users before they even know whether or not they like the game.  And as long as HvH games are available, people can just graduate from playing bots to playing each other a little sooner.

I understand why the money situation means you can only provide the service as-is, but within that framework, you might as well try to make your dollars go as far as possible.  Given that you have X resource, it makes sense to stretch it by spending it on cheap bots and HvH games rather than blowing it on the expensive bots.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 8th, 2009, 6:01am
By the way, does the load problem correlate to multi-threaded bots from 2009?  It occurs to me that the pre-2009 bots are limited as to the CPU they can hog.  Being single threaded, the earlier bots can at most max out one of the four server cores.  Did that change with the latest bots?

Perhaps for the 2010 Challenge you should add a requirement that the bots have a flag that forces them to run in single-threaded mode, so that you can add them to the bot ladder without having them suck up all four cores when they run.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Janzert on Oct 8th, 2009, 12:30pm
Is the largest portion of processing power going to bots for people working up the ladder or for people past the ladder and playing bots? Whatever the mix is now I would expect long term the majority will be people play bots outside of working up the ladder.

For the ladder bots I think they will always need to be hosted on an official server so Omar can keep complete control over them. For everything else though it might scale better to encourage others to host the bots. Currently the only way to make a bot available for play in the gameroom is by having it open a game and wait for an opponent. If they could instead place themselves in an "online" list like human players and then accept (or reject) invitations to a game at the opponents preferred time control it would make the system quite a bit more flexible. With that in place I think it would then also make sense to encourage third parties to host bots if they have the resources available. For example I would probably only be able to host one instance of opfor, but I could certainly release a package so others could also host instances under other accounts.

Janzert
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Arimabuff on Oct 8th, 2009, 5:18pm

on 10/08/09 at 05:54:21, Fritzlein wrote:
The problem could also be eased by offering only P1 and P2 bots for free, and having other bots be pay-per-use.  Human vs. human games could still be free.  Developers could still offer their bots, running on their own servers, to be free to play if they chose.  The computer science experiment that is Arimaa would not be hampered by this arrangement.

The reason I propose leaving the P1 and P2 bots available for free is that they bot ladder gives newer players an excellent introduction to the game, a try-before-you-buy experience.  By the time you have passed all those bots in the ladder, you are halfway through, and you know whether or not you are addicted.  But at the same time, these bots put a fraction of the load on the server that the fast and blitz bots do.  The benefit/price ratio is higher for the lower bots.

The reason I propose shutting off the blitz, fast, and CC bots is that we don't want to alienate new users by giving them a bad experience.  It is better to limit the experience and have it be positive than to try to accommodate everyone and give a mediocre or negative experience.  We don't want to alienate new users before they even know whether or not they like the game.  And as long as HvH games are available, people can just graduate from playing bots to playing each other a little sooner.

I understand why the money situation means you can only provide the service as-is, but within that framework, you might as well try to make your dollars go as far as possible.  Given that you have X resource, it makes sense to stretch it by spending it on cheap bots and HvH games rather than blowing it on the expensive bots.

So after a while you'll be left with an army of never ending stream of novices who will move on as soon as they'll realize that the P1 and P2 bots are too mediocre to make the game interesting.  As for the HvH games, the sites who offers only that kind of game are nearly dead unless they have a plethora of different games to chose from. Like iggamecenter that doesn't have half of the activity of this site even though it offers dozens of original games including different forms of Chess, Checkers and GO.

Basically what you’re proposing is to dumb down Arimaa in order to save it.


Well good luck with that.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by tize on Oct 9th, 2009, 2:55am
The high load problem could also due to the server running out of memory. I don't know how much memory the server has, but the previous challenge server had only 2GB of ram. And a bot can use quite a lot of memory for the hash tables. I know fairy uses at least 500MB, if this is usual then the server could be starting to swap in and out the running bots when there's only four(!) bots playing.

I don't know the memory requirement of the current bots, but this could be one piece of the puzzle.

So maybe a flag to lower the bots resource hunger (one thread and max 100MB ram).
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 9th, 2009, 6:28am

on 10/08/09 at 17:18:41, Arimabuff wrote:
Basically what you’re proposing is to dumb down Arimaa in order to save it.

Well good luck with that.

Basically what you're proposing is that we expect Omar to pay even more money out of pocket so we all can play every bot unlimited times for free, or else we will complain about the bad service we are getting when the server slows down.

Well good luck with that.

I foresee a day when Omar decides he can no longer afford his Arimaa hobby, and is forced to shut down the whole enterprise.  The economy is in the tank.  Unless Arimaa boxed set sales miraculously explode in the coming year, Arimaa.com will remain a money-losing enterprise.  When economic reality sets in, do you think Omar's first commitment will be to making us happy, or to paying his mortgage and feeding his family?

I hope that Arimaa sweeps all the "Game of the Year" awards, the sales of boxed sets go through the roof, and Omar is awash in cash from Arimaa.  That a fun dream, and there is a non-zero probability it will come true.  Yay!  Realistically, though, we should help Omar brainstorm about ways to stretch every dollar that he is willing to spend on Arimaa.com, rather than just riding him until he feels forced to pull the plug.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 9th, 2009, 6:39am

on 10/08/09 at 12:30:47, Janzert wrote:
For the ladder bots I think they will always need to be hosted on an official server so Omar can keep complete control over them. For everything else though it might scale better to encourage others to host the bots.

I think it is a great idea to make hosting bots easier.  That's a way people can donate to the community at a low cost and high benefit.  I already own my computer and I already pay a monthly Internet connection fee, so hosting a bot at night only costs me the electricity of leaving the computer on.  It's cheap by virtue of taking advantage of costs I have already paid.  I have no idea how many people would step up to make such a donation, but it is worth a shot.  (Also, many thanks to developers who already put up their bots for public play; it's a great service to the community.)

If non-developers won't make that donation for free, they might be enticed by pay-per-play bots at something like five or ten cent per bot game.  This would make an interesting test of communal economic perception.  Is there a price point which is low enough that players would be willing to pay to play, but high enough to cover the expenses of the hosts?  If there is no mutually beneficial price point, then man vs. machine contests are simply economically infeasible.  Of course, since human vs. human games don't suck up so much CPU, those could still be offered very cheaply.  Low-tech rules!
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by The_Jeh on Oct 9th, 2009, 9:06am

on 10/09/09 at 06:39:23, Fritzlein wrote:
I think it is a great idea to make hosting bots easier.  That's a way people can donate to the community at a low cost and high benefit.  I already own my computer and I already pay a monthly Internet connection fee, so hosting a bot at night only costs me the electricity of leaving the computer on.  It's cheap by virtue of taking advantage of costs I have already paid.  I have no idea how many people would step up to make such a donation, but it is worth a shot.  (Also, many thanks to developers who already put up their bots for public play; it's a great service to the community.)

If non-developers won't make that donation for free, they might be enticed by pay-per-play bots at something like five or ten cent per bot game.  This would make an interesting test of communal economic perception.  Is there a price point which is low enough that players would be willing to pay to play, but high enough to cover the expenses of the hosts?  If there is no mutually beneficial price point, then man vs. machine contests are simply economically infeasible.  Of course, since human vs. human games don't suck up so much CPU, those could still be offered very cheaply.  Low-tech rules!


If it is considered all right for individuals to host the bots on their computers, even though this might create nonstandard playing strengths, would it be possible for those playing the bots to play for free if they host the games they play themselves by downloading the bot on a per game basis?

I suppose that despite the increased traffic, it is still far too low for advertising space to generate money.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by omar on Oct 10th, 2009, 3:36pm
Thanks everyone for your concern and suggestions.


Quote:
The problem could also be eased by offering only P1 and P2 bots for free, and having other bots be pay-per-use.

You are right that the P1 and P2 bots don't add much load compared to the other bots; especially the newer bots which use multi-cores. However, I can't just make the other bots pay-per-use. I would have to first work out something with each of the bot developers. But you are essentially right, something like this could be done. My concern would be that the income from pay-per-use would not be enough to support the service. At least not yet.


Quote:
Currently the only way to make a bot available for play in the gameroom is by having it open a game and wait for an opponent. If they could instead place themselves in an "online" list like human players and then accept (or reject) invitations to a game at the opponents preferred time control it would make the system quite a bit more flexible.

Actually this could be done right now. But it requires running a web server on the system that has the bot so that a page like this can be provided so that the bot can be started on demand to join an already created game.
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/bots/bot_Bomb2005CC/


Quote:
I foresee a day when Omar decides he can no longer afford his Arimaa hobby, and is forced to shut down the whole enterprise

Lets hope it never comes to that.


Quote:
If it is considered all right for individuals to host the bots on their computers,  ...

The current terms under which bot developers submit the bots to me would not allow me to let others host them. I would have to request permission from each developer first.


Quote:
I don't know the memory requirement of the current bots, but this could be one piece of the puzzle. So maybe a flag to lower the bots resource hunger (one thread and max 100MB ram).

But it wouldn't be fun to play weakened bots especially for the experienced players.


Quote:
I suppose that despite the increased traffic, it is still far too low for advertising space to generate money.

I tried running google ads once, but it generated next to nothing :-)
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 10th, 2009, 4:43pm
If I understand you correctly, Omar, you are satisfied with the status quo.  We'll see what happens next!
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by tize on Oct 11th, 2009, 1:07am

Quote:
Actually this could be done right now. But it requires running a web server on the system that has the bot so that a page like this can be provided so that the bot can be started on demand to join an already created game.

This solution is fine if you don't live behind a NAT, plus that Janzert's idea would allow players more easily see which bots are avaliable. Because I for one can't allow Marwin to be avaliable all the time. Not saying that we must have this feature just that it would be an improvement.


Quote:
But it wouldn't be fun to play weakened bots especially for the experienced players.

I'd rather play a weakened version of the bots at blitz/fast than having the blitz/fast be removed due to the server load being to high. But as long as the server can handle it, I too rather have the bots play without any arbitrary restrictions.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by omar on Oct 12th, 2009, 6:25pm

Quote:
If I understand you correctly, Omar, you are satisfied with the status quo.  We'll see what happens next!

Well, I am definitely not happy about the server load causing games to time out. If we continue to get more players then sooner or later I will have to get a second server. Eventually I think the option of accepting donations will be sufficient to fund a second server.


Quote:
This solution is fine if you don't live behind a NAT, plus that Janzert's idea would allow players more easily see which bots are avaliable. Because I for one can't allow Marwin to be avaliable all the time. Not saying that we must have this feature just that it would be an improvement.

Yes, it is more difficult if you are behind a NAT, but if your ISP provides a semi-static IP address then some port forwarding in your router config can be used to make the web server accessible from outside. A way for bots to register that they are available even though they don't have a game open would be a good feature.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by chimaera on Oct 13th, 2009, 7:14pm

on 10/12/09 at 18:25:44, omar wrote:
Yes, it is more difficult if you are behind a NAT, but if your ISP provides a semi-static IP address then some port forwarding in your router config can be used to make the web server accessible from outside. A way for bots to register that they are available even though they don't have a game open would be a good feature.


You can use http://www.dyndns.com/ to give yourself a free named subdomain. Many routers have support for DynDNS and can automatically notify DynDNS.com when your IP changes.
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by omar on Oct 18th, 2009, 6:53am

on 10/13/09 at 19:14:33, chimaera wrote:
You can use http://www.dyndns.com/ to give yourself a free named subdomain. Many routers have support for DynDNS and can automatically notify DynDNS.com when your IP changes.


Cool. Maybe someday I'll be able to run the arimaa.com site from home.


Just kidding :-)
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by Janzert on Oct 21st, 2009, 6:56am
One thing that I thought of regarding the load issue. OpFor has pondering built in. I don't think it adds much strength so for all the versions in the ladder it might be best to disable pondering. That would eliminate any cpu load on the server while it is the opponents turn.

Janzert
Title: Re: Does this site crash for everyone... or just m
Post by omar on Oct 24th, 2009, 5:44pm
Thanks for mentioning this. I just checked the bots and found that all the 2008 versions of OpFor had pondering turned off except the CC version; all the 2009 versions had pondering turned on. I've turned off pondering for all versions of both years.


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