Very slow server, is it worth our fees?

[IPA_thanks]

 

I appreciate the qualities of the game but it is unsustainable that loading and editing routes and aircraft comes with such a long wait for the server to respond. This needs to be fixed - get more processing power, lower the fees or you'll see players go elsewhere

[Kadachiman]

Works fine for me and the cost to play this game is very reasonable

[Mr.HP]

Only closing a route takes me quite a while (about 10s), otherwise, everything is good

[Sami]

If it seems to be slow, it is in the connection somewhere between you and us (please ask your ISP to check). The server itself is extremely fast with low loading and no other users at all other than this site.

And also, you can see from http://uptime.airwaysim.com that it is actually very fast, measured by an independent third party system..

[IPA_thanks]

Thanks for looking into it. I can be more precise - I am on a really fast connection and all other servers work fine. I assume that there is a back end to the database where the server looks up what aircraft go where, what routes they are assigned to. So messages etc open up quickly enough but once I want to sort the list of routes or edit a route there is a wait of maybe half a minute. I remember it being quick enough when I had a handful of planes but as numbers have grown the game has become unbearably slow. And a slow game is a game one does not want to pay for, obviously.

[[SC] - King Kong]

Then stop paying for it.

Airline Tycoon 2 is on discount at Amazon! Enjoy!

[Infinity]

Thanks for looking into it. I can be more precise - I am on a really fast connection and all other servers work fine. I assume that there is a back end to the database where the server looks up what aircraft go where, what routes they are assigned to. So messages etc open up quickly enough but once I want to sort the list of routes or edit a route there is a wait of maybe half a minute. I remember it being quick enough when I had a handful of planes but as numbers have grown the game has become unbearably slow. And a slow game is a game one does not want to pay for, obviously.

As others have told you, the game is not slow. It is working perfectly fine for everybody else, so the problem is either on your side or somewhere in between, but certainly not on the games side.

[IPA_thanks]

I appreciate your comments - there is no other way for players to find out if the problem is at their end or a problem that others have been struggling with so we all benefit from helping each other out by helpful suggestions and information. I have tried using other browsers and eventually narrowed the problem down to the Skype add-on for Firefox which auto-installed with the last Skype upgrade. What took time seems to have been the plugin checking all the route departure times as potential phone numbers. So it has all been sorted - you can sleep at peace now, folks.

[Curse]

To be honest some actions are slow - however, those are based on design decisions and the loading of the interface.

Examples:

1) Deleting of a 7-day-schedule via route management, route number search, mark all 7 flights in the box and then "close checked routes & keep slots". This takes 3-20 seconds, depending on your own computer speed (my 2nd and 3rd computer take noticably longer than my primary gaming machine) and time of the day (what basically means how much load is on the AWS server - morning in Germany works way better than afternoon or night).

2) Route creating has small loading times.

3) Change pages of routes has small loading times.

4) Route edit has small loading times.



All these things are connected to the new "fancy" UI. And yes, it actually looks way better than the old UI, but sometimes I wish there was an ugly but extremely fast UI available.

Creating new 7-day-schedules on my older computers (Pentium Dual Core, oc to 2,95GHz) is basically impossible compared to the newer ones (Intel i7 860, oc to 3,5GHz), while my new CPU (Xeon E3-1231V3) provides basically no advantage over the i7 860, so the loading times can't be further influenced by me.


Connection is (24/7!) 200MBit download/10MBit upload, not shared, so should be fast enough, too.

[meiru]

All these things are connected to the new "fancy" UI. And yes, it actually looks way better than the old UI, but sometimes I wish there was an ugly but extremely fast UI available.

Creating new 7-day-schedules on my older computers (Pentium Dual Core, oc to 2,95GHz) is basically impossible compared to the newer ones (Intel i7 860, oc to 3,5GHz), while my new CPU (Xeon E3-1231V3) provides basically no advantage over the i7 860, so the loading times can't be further influenced by me.

I could write you a tool that does the 7 HTTP POST's within seconds and completely automaticly... 

[Curse]

lol! Nah, thanks, where's the fun then? I just wanted to point out there are some slower areas, however, they also depend heavily on the own computer equipment.

[JumboShrimp]

1) Deleting of a 7-day-schedule via route management, route number search, mark all 7 flights in the box and then "close checked routes & keep slots". This takes 3-20 seconds, depending on your own computer speed (my 2nd and 3rd computer take noticably longer than my primary gaming machine) and time of the day (what basically means how much load is on the AWS server - morning in Germany works way better than afternoon or night).

Yeah, deleting a route, even a single one is the only thing that is noticeably slow.

Creating new 7-day-schedules on my older computers (Pentium Dual Core, oc to 2,95GHz) is basically impossible compared to the newer ones (Intel i7 860, oc to 3,5GHz), while my new CPU (Xeon E3-1231V3) provides basically no advantage over the i7 860, so the loading times can't be further influenced by me.

Connection is (24/7!) 200MBit download/10MBit upload, not shared, so should be fast enough, too.

Would that older computer be running 32 bit Windows XP by any chance?  I think the slowness may be more related to the computer being memory starved, as high memory consumption of most of the browsers (displaying complex pages) tend to be a too much of a challenge for 32 bit XP...

[meiru]

Would that older computer be running 32 bit Windows XP by any chance?  I think the slowness may be more related to the computer being memory starved, as high memory consumption of most of the browsers (displaying complex pages) tend to be a too much of a challenge for 32 bit XP...

AWS uses a lot of scripts and those scripts seem to be full of memory leaks or at least they tend to create leaks in the browsers... that's why the page is extremely slow in some cases. This is even worsed because of some bugs in the html code and ajax functions doing things that destroy the memory management of today's browsers completely. I have to restart the IE every 20 minutes becuase it's getting so slow when playing AWS... incredible...

[Curse]

@ JumboShrimp

It's Win7 64Bit.

@ meiru

I encounter the "slow" problems with all browsers I use here: Chrome, Firefox and IE. However, I found IE is the fastest browser with AWS, at least on doing special tasks like pricing, while Chrome seems to be the best (fastest) for creating 7-day-schedules.

[JumboShrimp]

@ JumboShrimp

It's Win7 64Bit.

Hmm...  Interesting...

@ meiru

I encounter the "slow" problems with all browsers I use here: Chrome, Firefox and IE. However, I found IE is the fastest browser with AWS, at least on doing special tasks like pricing, while Chrome seems to be the best (fastest) for creating 7-day-schedules.

There was a time I used Chrome with AWS while scheduling a lot of routes, but since IE9 or IE10, there is absolutely no speed advantage for Chrome that I can detect.

Of course, every time I open Chrome, I feel like throwing up when I look at the amateurish job Chrome does rendering fonts.  Life is too short, and my eyesight is too precious to waste it on eyestrain Chrome causes (to me).

[LemonButt]

I run a database intensive website and the slowest page generation time I encounter is ~0.1 second.  That means if a page takes 1 second to load, 90% of that time is spent in transit or being rendered in a user's browser.

I am running a 5 year old desktop with an AMD Phenom II X4, 8gb of RAM, and Win7.  I use Chrome nearly exclusively with a bunch of developer extensions and never run into any speed/render issues with AWS.  The only exception is closing routes, which I assume is due to multiple table locks and inserting slots back into the slot pool which requires several IO's.

Additionally, I've got a 3 year old tablet running Jellybean and Android's Browser (Safari based) runs AWS without any issues plus I have a phone running Kitkat and Chrome that never has issues.  Typically, any issues you run into are going to be either using a slow browser (IE has been notorious for not using the latest web standards although most recent versions are better) or addons that slow everything down (anti-virus scanning in real time, bad browser extensions, malware, browser toolbars, etc.).

I just ran a ping test and it looks like if you are in certain parts of the world, your network connection to the AWS server might suck with 500+ms pings and packet loss: http://cloudmonitor.ca.com/en/ping.php?vtt=1402068004&varghost=airwaysim.com&vhost=_&vaction=ping&ping=start

Finland has a 3ms ping (surprise surprise! lol) and the worst seems to be China and Vietnam with ~500ms pings.  Europe appears to be <100ms and North America is <200ms.

[meiru]

One problem is also the huge amount of data and calls that has to be sent from and to the AWS Server. It's generating a way too high load that is completely useless. And then I suppose we have a SQL server behind that handles all queries. This is slowing down everything again. But it's true, the biggest problem is, that it is a browser game that uses graphics, that cannot be handeled by the browsers or an implementation (html) that does work against the browsers way of handling the data.

[JumboShrimp]

One problem is also the huge amount of data and calls that has to be sent from and to the AWS Server. It's generating a way too high load that is completely useless. And then I suppose we have a SQL server behind that handles all queries. This is slowing down everything again. But it's true, the biggest problem is, that it is a browser game that uses graphics, that cannot be handeled by the browsers or an implementation (html) that does work against the browsers way of handling the data.

Well, this is not Tic Tac Toe, this is a very complex simulation, that stores and runs queries against 10s or 100s MB database, which is the only practical, viable way to write this type of application.

As far as what it sends to the browser, have you really quantified it?  It seems to me that the only page that sends a larger than usual quantity of data is the scheduling page, and if the speed bothers you, why don't you limit your scheduling window to 10 or less rows, which will speed things up.

As far as browsers not being a game that display graphics, that too (use of graphics) is minimal.  Everything except scheduling is text. and drawing the boxes on the scheduling screen is not a super intensive as far as CPU / GPU.  Quite the opposite.

The big advantage of the game being a browser game is that browsers are universal.  AWS can be played on any computer, any device.

[LemonButt]

I think he is alluding to the ajax calls which open up new connections.  For example, on route planning you load the page and then once the page loads the actual data is fetched asynchronously, resulting in 2 connections to the server, database, etc.  The same goes for various other parts of the site.  Apache by default only allows you one connection, so if you request 5 pages at once it won't open up 5 threads, but 1 thread that will process and generate the pages back to back to back to back to back, slowing things down a bit.

I don't know what the backend looks like, but I'd venture to say there is a master database with all the demand values etc that is 1gb+ and then each airline probably has it's own table/database to store the huge amounts of data created by the game and for a full gameworld, ends up being 1gb+ each.

However, I bet if sami displayed page generation times on each page when it was created you'd find that no page takes more than half a second to generate, which means the rest of the delays are due to rendering/time in transit.

[meiru]

right... there's too many ajax calls transfering sometimes strange data... and e.g. now allowing a 7-day scheduling directly in the game slows it down, not having a good way for the "back" in the used aircraft market or the route management is an issue and about playing it on every device... sorry, but I cannot play this on my smartphone, because I've to wait too long for every action... I don't know why this is. And I really wonder how many of you don't use a normal pc to play this game.

In the end it's not a single problem, but a lot of small ones... and that's the same for other things in the game. It's not only the gui and speed problem that makes this game a full time job and not much fun...