Serverside Game Performance Update(s)

Hey all,

Over the past few weeks or so we have been doubling down on efforts to monitor and improve serverside performance with some exciting progress but more work yet to be done.

First, a little bit of a back story. For all our games performance has always been a top priority along with game uptime and clean error logs, all have always been tackled with highest priority. I have personally always viewed all as tying into quality / experience with gaming and have driven that into the culture at Kano. So in short, there is no need to convince us that performance is important

Now some updates & general stats to help give a clearer picture:

• over the past couple weeks we have made a couple serverside improvements that have reduced some slow connections and improved overall throughput to our webservers
• we have drastically improved our serverside latency monitoring capabilities, which has uncovered some new areas we can tackle for improvement and give us the ability to target / prioritize individual screens for loading improvements

Now some stats:

VC FB -
16,042,574 screen loads
282,465 screens took longer than 1 second to load(1.76%)
278,259 loaded with an average of 1.76 seconds (1.73%)
4,206 reloading screen without waiting (0.026%)

The timings above are all from the players perspective, total time to make a request to our servers and to get a response so includes network latency and takes personal network connections into consideration.

Those stats are pretty similar across all our games with highest average I have seen is 2.3% requests taking longer than 1 second. All in all, that is pretty good, was expecting to see higher number to be honest but that being said now that we have that number visible it gives us a target to drive that down and first goal will be to drive that to <1% for all games but we will need some time to get there but it is a priority.

Anyways, those stats should give you a good idea where we are at and as for where we are going:

• performance team has one open issue that we are currently investigating and hope to have a resolution in the next week or so, it does not appear to be major impact but fixing will give us a better overall picture of performance in the games
• continue to work on monitoring to escalate potential issues and prioritize slow loading screens
• set targets around reducing percentage of slow screen loads and report on weekly internally

Hopefully that wasn't too mind numbing but felt it was important to communicate as we have been very busy over here making some performance monitoring and improvements.

 

Keep up the good work

“There is no such thing as a problem breed. However, there is no shortage of 'problem owners'....” ― Cesar Millan

 

I have to say, I never have any problems via kanoplay website with lag, but FB slows it all down - on all games - AND it doesnt matter how many times you send gifts to people, I get asked about 95% of the time via that stupid FB pop up for permission to send the giftd.... (as far as I know not your fault, but you might have more luck telling FB the have ballsed up their site again!)

 

GO PERFORMANCE!

 

Wtg guys
Good job

 

Thanks for all the hard work

 

Good luck in the future!

 

Awesosme. Thanks!

I know for us old timers it's more noticeable since we remember the days when lag of any sort was unheard of

KP for examples big draw was that it was so much faster to load than any of the other places not having to go through a 3rd party site and when that one started getting unplayable we lost a number of folks that we could not afford to lose.

So we are eternally grateful that you have taken our frustrations serious and are working to correct it.

While I still hit the not working refresh at times, I can now wait it out and know it'll resolve if I'm patient and I can play again. Before, it just would not go away, so we ARE seeing progress.

YAY!

 

I get impatient I like real time, click BAM its there not, click page refreshing, wait wait wait wait wait oh there is my page

 

And thats why i dont send any gifts or other things. Waste to many time. And thanks for the tip. Kano play is indeed faster xD. Now i can ignore facebook god bless. I hate facebook.

 

My mind is numb now

 

This is good to see as these baselines are critical to establish to drive the performance "goals". The mind numbing part is the player experiences "Refreshing ... Reload Page?" etc ...

For my own mini monitoring with a sidebar view of the network performance and the game ... am glad that I stopped doing that as it has improved. Its not over for sure as myself and one other player at minimum to notice when we are listed for bounty, that at a certain point in time, "healing" is fruitless still as the "refresh" factor kicks in, stalling the healing process. This is still present as "we" definitely cannot heal as we once could i.e. you need quite the attack/health combo to make a good dent and to have clear shots in to do so, with the half healing point ... in essence, some high levels are not going down unless they do run into refresh issues. When the ability to heal is present again, without a stall, the performance issues will be resolved ... to my view.

I sense optimism so am all for it

 

thank you for sharing

 

Thank you!!! The latency was really bad.

 

Thanks for looking into this. The game usually runs smoothly, but like all flash based applications, it can get hung up and lag really bad at times. On that note, what's going to happen if/when flash stops being supported, or have you already made changes such that it is able to run natively in a browser?
In my opinion, you guys are doing a great job at keeping on top of any bugs/issues that affect gameplay.

 

your improvements are very fine, but over the last three days, in mob wars,lcn, VC, Pirate clan, and zs, there has been a lag ingame and i keep getting kicked out when on facebook. also have had a long problem with signing into the games now, it keeps kicking me back to having to log in with fb when i am already logged in another window for vc or another game. I always had two windows open so I could play between two games, but now it is kicking me off one or the other game. and then I have to wait a hour or so before I can log backin or I have to restart the whole internet servor and start over

 

I am been booted numerous times past few days saying your fb session has expired, and takes 2 mins to reload, yet my fb was just fine. This ONLY happens when clicking non stop on the hit list

 

I think Flash is only used by FB ... I hope.

Re the latency ... seems after being listed and listing a big boy ... that the heal function is working again ... pre April 2015 .... hard times over?????? Not 100% sure.

 

FB is not using Flash, Flash is used only by the Deal of the Day part on the HOME page. At least when I disable Flash, only that part is missing, and I still can access the Offers by clicking on the Earn Favor Points! at the bottom of the page without the Flash eating up all my memory.

 

thank you for fixing this problem been wanting to say this for awhile when i had the time to do so..Thanks for fixin the performance update..