Hi guys:
With most of us on lockdown and spending quality time with our loved ones, I have noticed that the game response times are very slow. I wanted to check to see if others are experiencing this or is it a problem with my internet provider. I am sure Sami's servers are on overdrive right now but the little twirling circle is putting me to sleep. I have a feeling it is just because everyone is home and on the internet at the same time but I thought I would throw it out there to see if it is a localized or generalized issue. I checked my internet speed and it was showing very fast to download and so-so to upload.
Stay home and stay healthy, my fellow gamers.
Cheers,
Tuckernut
I've had intermittent issues. I read that the entire internet is under strain right now due to increased usage so it's likely something in the network between players and the server versus the server itself.
You can monitor the uptime/response times from here: http://uptime.airwaysim.com/
The service measures the front page response time every 1 min and uses several locations around the world.
If the AWS is really slow or unreachable please do a ping and a traceroute from your computer to see which midpoint is causing the problem (it's usually always somewhere in between you and us in the routing and not our server itself). On Windows machines you will probably get a few timeouts from your local network, disregard those.
Since AWS is a small business we don't have fancy load-balancers or servers around the globe so every once in a while some part of the world might be slow towards us. But if the problems are frequent and from many locations then we got to take a closer look.
I have a 1gb fiber connection and get a consistent 137ms response time from the US. For what it's worth, Amazon CloudFront would speed up response time for static assets, reduce the trace route nodes that can cause issues, and is highly configurable (many CDNs just want to hijack your entire domain)--you just set the current endpoint as the origin. The "delay" I have on my end aside from latency is the fact that Apache doesn't handle concurrent connections which creates render blocking. I assume it's a LAMP stack, but if CloudFront were added you could serve up static assets with concurrency that should take a massive load off the server and reduce the js bootstrap timing, especially for those ajax pages that require an additional round trip to load the page (round trip timing won't change, but it will get initiated by the browser faster).
My latency is tolerable, but the southern hemisphere is typically the worst for lag due to being so far away from so many datacenters. In just the past few years CDNs have come a long way and have gotten ridiculously cheap with some less configurable ones being completely free. Our use case has been for ~100k visitors/month and our CloudFront bill has ever been more than $100. We also use Amazon Certificate Manager to automatically handle/issue SSL certificates/connections so we never have to worry about expiry (or paying for an SSL cert--it's completely free including wildcard certs and not paying Sectigo ransom covers our CloudFront bill). If you set up routing to handle the SSL handshake at the CloudFront edge locations to fully separate concerns, things get stupid fast but I think you have to use Amazon load balancers to make that happen.
I setup a CloudFront distro with 2 clicks to test the speed improvement (just pointed to airwaysim.com as origin--it uses origin cache headers for behavior): https://d3u448jeuar50i.cloudfront.net/ I was able to load a screenshot from the game tour page in 10% the time by not hitting the server in Finland (59ms on CloudFront versus 739ms on current server). There is already caching in place on Apache, but since the roundtrip is so long even getting a 304 cached response is done in only 25% of the time (39ms v. 156ms) which would means pages with cached assets would load ~4 times faster than they do today (even faster down under). I'm providing all this as I'm sure you get blistering fast response times being in the same country as the servers :) I have more time on my hands than I know what to do with right now and I can help set this up if you're interested--I'd selfishly love to see pages load faster and the Aussie players must be seeing really slow response times (note the Sydney timings go from 325ms to ~1ms response time).
I'll check that out and send you a msg in private later on. Amazon is easy since our emails already use the SES (billing & accounts etc all set up).
(Tried CloudFlare in the past for some other project and that was rather unreliable.)
From what I see, the further you are from Finland, the slower the reaction times are. Which should not be surprising. Internet is under heavy load those times.
Quote from: gazzz0x2z on April 07, 2020, 09:43:20 AM
From what I see, the further you are from Finland, the slower the reaction times are. Which should not be surprising. Internet is under heavy load those times.
It's not necessarily that the load in Europe is higher, but physical limitations. Data travels through fiber at the speed of light and as as fast as the speed of light is, it still takes several hundred milliseconds to go around the world even with zero congestion.
I was only ~135ms away from the server but I'm seeing a noticeable performance improvement from the US, especially when opening many tabs at once (requests aren't queuing up for static assets and now loading concurrently). I'm now getting 19ms response time on the static subdomain with only 6 hops instead of 137ms and 16 hops to the server in Finland. I assume the folks in the southern hemisphere are seeing huge improvements, too :)
I think the problem with the "twirling circle" can be browser-based too.
I have the "twirling circle" with my schedule page in JA (I only have 50 planes) with Chromium. I often get the "page not responding" just loading or switching page.
At first it's OK, but when I swap schedules between A/C for the 3rd or 4th time, I get the error or it's very long to load (more than 20s).
I don't have this problem in Firefox (Standard or ESR) or Chrome in other games (for example BW with 117 planes, but perhaps the problem is only in medium/long length games), only in Chromium. All the browsers have the same plugins: Ghostery, uBlock, LastPass
Try using an other browser and check if you still have this problem.
Edit: I limited the schedule page to 30 in JA and set it to the max in BW