Everybody wants to play against Mittens?
Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#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?
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#13I wonder if they upgraded to Scala 3.
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 I thought they were using Java (but I may have outdated knowledge).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?
It was a pithy comment on Lichess's recent post on upgrading to Scala 3.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#14Chess has to be one of the easier games to scale up, no?
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#15I wonder if they upgraded to Scala 3.
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 I thought they were using Java (but I may have outdated knowledge).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.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#16Earlier 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 I thought they were using Java (but I may have outdated knowledge).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.
So, Web-scale tech? I bet load is more on the everything but the chess engine itself.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#17Chess 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.”
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#18Chess.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, which is good for chess since it allows more chess players to make a living.
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#19Some previous discussion around scaling their database: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25730778
Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
#20Chess has to be one of the easier games to scale up, no?
Good question.
A web chess game is turn based with some basic logic to sync the clock. There are no secrets or complex state like many video games. Seems rather straightforward.
The hard part is scaling up everything around it:
- Stockfish real-time predictions
- anti-cheat monitoring
- the moderation tasks any social website needs