I find it funny that a large business is struggling where an open source product with an incredibly lean team is coping with no issues
Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
91–100 of 132 posts
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#92Chess.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…
>run by people who aren't good at chess To be fair, Danny Rensch is a 2402 FIDE rated player. That's better than 99.9% of people on the planet.
"People" on the planet? If that's accurate it's not super impressive, considering that probably 95-99% (or more) of people don't take chess very seriously. I used to be the top 99-99.5% of Counter-Strike players (_very_ roughly obviously), and that wasn't very impressive at all even though it's way past top 99.9% of "people on the planet".
(that being said,
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#93> What does that mean? 250,000+ new accounts are being created each day. People are playing games (16,000 chess moves per second on average) I remember reading how Dropbox and other file sharing sites used hashing to create single instances of popular files and then just used pointers from accounts with that file to save disk space. I would imagine a LOT of chess games probably start out the same and you can therefor…
you probably can encode a whole board in a small-ish string, something you can put in a url hash. But chess game is also a history of moves.
Pretty sure you could fit it in a 64 bit int/bitmap.
Potentially some SIMD optimisations could be done in this direction
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#94> What does that mean? 250,000+ new accounts are being created each day. People are playing games (16,000 chess moves per second on average) I remember reading how Dropbox and other file sharing sites used hashing to create single instances of popular files and then just used pointers from accounts with that file to save disk space. I would imagine a LOT of chess games probably start out the same and you can therefor…
you probably can encode a whole board in a small-ish string, something you can put in a url hash. But chess game is also a history of moves.
I have played chess maybe 5 times in my life.. so I have no idea but..
Maybe you could store all the moves in an array of 2 byte ints. I doubt you can have more than 32k moves in a chess game.
Assume 10kb per game in memory. You can run 1 million games on 10gb.
Store the moves in the end, run your analysis, etc.
Or am I missing something?
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
lichess.org >>> chess.com. I encourage everyone who can afford to donate to do so!
Feature wise I agree with you, lichess is amazing. Chess.com funds a lot of tounaments that make the chess scene a lot more fun and interesting, lichess cant't do that.
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Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
>run by people who aren't good at chess To be fair, Danny Rensch is a 2402 FIDE rated player. That's better than 99.9% of people on the planet.
"People" on the planet? If that's accurate it's not super impressive, considering that probably 95-99% (or more) of people don't take chess very seriously. I used to be the top 99-99.5% of Counter-Strike players (_very_ roughly obviously), and that wasn't very impressive at all even though it's way past top 99.9% of "people on the planet". (that being said,
Ok just to be clear you're saying a 2400 rating isn't impressive? I'm not sure this is a hill worth dying on for the sake of useless pedantry.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#97> What does that mean? 250,000+ new accounts are being created each day. People are playing games (16,000 chess moves per second on average) I remember reading how Dropbox and other file sharing sites used hashing to create single instances of popular files and then just used pointers from accounts with that file to save disk space. I would imagine a LOT of chess games probably start out the same and you can therefor…
I don't play chess, but my finger in the air estimate is that the whole record of the game weighs a few kb at most.
I'd venture a guess that all players data and their avatars take more space. Or maybe less, but not much.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>run by people who aren't good at chess To be fair, Danny Rensch is a 2402 FIDE rated player. That's better than 99.9% of people on the planet.
"People" on the planet? If that's accurate it's not super impressive, considering that probably 95-99% (or more) of people don't take chess very seriously. I used to be the top 99-99.5% of Counter-Strike players (_very_ roughly obviously), and that wasn't very impressive at all even though it's way past top 99.9% of "people on the planet". (that being said,
You can find whatever semantic qualifier makes it impressive enough for you, but a 2400 FIDE rating is extremely impressive and difficult to achieve.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#99I've re-visited the game multiple times but really have trouble engaging with the game. I've tried to read a couple of tutorials here and there on some simple strategies, but it doesn't seem like anything "sticks," and I always feel so clueless after the first few moves as to what I should do. Any suggestions from the HN crowd on what may have provided you an "ah ha!" moment for chess strategy in general?
What worked for me was the old Chessmaster tutorials done by Josh Waitzkin. It gives you structured practice problems around general principles and strategies. It was kind of addicting the way they structured it and made me want to keep going. What I got out of it were the general fundamentals that allow you to perform an opening without using pure memorization, and how to look for tactical advantages in mid game like forks and skewers. Once I finished it I started easily seeing all the opening mistakes other beginners made and won a bunch of games just following the general principles. I’ve tried some other similar tutorials since but it is still the best I’ve used as an interactive tutorial.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they even use Scala? I thought they were using Java (but I may have outdated knowledge). Lichess is written in Scala. Do you have any pointer to an article describing chess.com tech stack?
The listings on https://www.chess.com/jobs provide some hints. Some mentions of PHP and Java for the backend, Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis, MySQL, Mongo, AWS, and GCP, among other things.
Well there’s the bottleneck in a nut shell. Ditch the PHP. At least consider Play if you can’t ditch the Java (I can’t vouch for it, but theoretically it should help.)
Otherwise they should consider Elixir/Phoenix as it is easily distributable and/or Rust if they need breakneck speed per thread.