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Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

chess.com

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Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#21

Post by traverseda »

wongarsu wrote: post #12

> All of this generates data that needs to be written to our databases. Sometimes our systems max out, and just as when someone exercises too hard and has to stop and catch their breath, our servers also become exhausted and need to recover. When that happens, they quit working, and our site and apps become unresponsive Is this a tortured analogy, or are their servers actually crashing under load?

Presumably they're referring to some kind of periodic database maintenance: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/maintenance.html

Alternatively they might be doing something weird involving periodically flushing the database from memory and onto disc.

That wouldn't mean "crashing", but likely would mean the database wasn't usable as a database.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#22

Post by Kranar »

wongarsu wrote: post #12

> All of this generates data that needs to be written to our databases. Sometimes our systems max out, and just as when someone exercises too hard and has to stop and catch their breath, our servers also become exhausted and need to recover. When that happens, they quit working, and our site and apps become unresponsive Is this a tortured analogy, or are their servers actually crashing under load?

I don't think they're saying it crashes. They're suggesting that they have buffers of data that fill up during periods of high load, and when those buffers get full they have to drop any new incoming requests until the buffers get flushed to the database. During that period of time the site becomes unresponsive.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#23

Post by jsnell »

SanchoPanda wrote: post #6

Doubled since December, and held there? Unreal.

The Google Trends graphs support it:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

None of their explanations sounds at all plausible though.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#25

Post by tester457 »

slm_HN wrote: post #18

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr. However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org. They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, whic…

Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing.

There's a lesson in here.

Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#27

Post by bgirard »

Waterluvian wrote: post #17

Chess found its way into my YouTube feed and that got me back into it. I wonder if this is just some bizarre case of the outcome of some thing like that. “Oops we accidentally put chess in front of everyone for a week and now they’re all playing it.”

I found that as well. The cheating controversy seemed to have kicked off some interest and then chess started appearing in my YouTube and TikTok feed have started recommending interesting creators. For the first time I've been passively watching content learning chess more formally.

One interesting event can kick off feed recommendations and start this fly wheel effect.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#28

Post by pictur »

tester457 wrote: post #25
slm_HN wrote: post #18

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr. However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org. They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, whic…

Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

this is a sad fact of life. a great project in terms of engineering can be beaten by a job that is just a wordpress page but great in terms of marketing.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#29

Post by urbandw311er »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #7

Lichess.org does everything Chess.com does but more, without needing to pay.

I don’t mind paying for something particularly if it means the people who run it can make a living from it —- and hopefully ensure it’s still around in 10 years time.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#30

Post by dan-robertson »

tester457 wrote: post #25
slm_HN wrote: post #18

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr. However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org. They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, whic…

Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

Is the lesson Berkson’s fallacy?
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