Lag is unreal

[Zaravacher]

Does any of the fellow neopians have any tips to help with this lag?

 

I have tried changing browser and nothing seems to be helping and i was curious if anything worked for anyone else x

[hrtbrk]

There's nothing you can do but wait. Needless to say, I'm sure most of us have seen a lot worse over the past few months lol

[Zaravacher]

sigh ok :(

 

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[bijyuarukei]

I'm having issues with the wheels. I always get a server error. Do you think this could be due to the lag or just a random glitch?

[Mouseykins]

If the wheels are glitching on you by giving you the error message wait it out if they're still spinning normally. The error message will disappear, the wheel will stop and you'll get your prize. If the wheel doesn't stop after some time then it's likely that it had a hiccup. I haven't had any problems with the wheels in at least a week or more.

[lakecat]

If the wheels are acting up, make a note of what your NP amount and health was before you spin. Then compare afterwards. Sometimes I wait, and even if it had said "try again later" it settles down and says the result. Other times I close the page before it stops spinning and then look at any changes. A few times over the years, when the Wheel of Excitement didn't stop spinning, it gave me the 20,000. :santa:

[KyokoHateshinai]

The lag is definitely real...I'm trying to price my items on shop wizard and I swear I'm about to give up -.- But as others say, I have experienced worst. But still...so annoying -.-

[Shane for Wax]

For the sake of reference, for the lag that is being experienced on Neopets lately there's not really much that you can do on your end of things to make it better. It has everything to do with their servers and such and nothing to do with your computer or ISP or network. Usually a good way to check if it's the site or your connection is to check multiple other sites as well as measure your upload/download times with various speed tests available online.

[AlissaGoesRAWR]

Hey guys, it's been a while since I've logged on... probably about a year or so, I think. Can someone give me some context? Why is this lag so unbearable and extended? I thought it was on my end until I checked out Twitter and saw a bunch of people complaining about similar issues.

[fullonparanoid]

Hey guys, it's been a while since I've logged on... probably about a year or so, I think. Can someone give me some context? Why is this lag so unbearable and extended?

 

Neopets was sold by Viacom to Jumpstart. In SEPTEMBER they switched servers. Ever since the server transfer it has been a complete mess. The lag and seemingly endless glitches (and spotty, at best, communication from TNT) has driven away loads of users.

 

Here we are well into FEBRUARY and the lag persists...as do a rotating array of glitches.

 

IMO, there is NO EXCUSE. 5 months? FIVE months? /shakes head

 

I love my silly critters, though, so I'm stickin' it out until the bitter end. At this point, only the most patient and most loyal remain...and they certainly are not winning over any NEW users.

 

Ah well.

 

Welcome back? :D

[Shane for Wax]

It has gotten better overtime, however, especially when they switched servers after the company move from viacom to jumpstart. The first jumpstart server just could not handle us all.

 

Like I keep saying, Jumpstart probably hideously underestimated how much of a strain the users put on a server (or servers I guess). I mean, it's not like Neopets is dead. We still have quite a few people visiting the site, especially when they decide to do events like the Charity Corner. Compared to now and late last year it's a marked improvement. Probably as people finally realize various statistics.

[AlissaGoesRAWR]

 

Neopets was sold by Viacom to Jumpstart. In SEPTEMBER they switched servers. Ever since the server transfer it has been a complete mess. The lag and seemingly endless glitches (and spotty, at best, communication from TNT) has driven away loads of users.

 

Here we are well into FEBRUARY and the lag persists...as do a rotating array of glitches.

 

IMO, there is NO EXCUSE. 5 months? FIVE months? /shakes head

 

I love my silly critters, though, so I'm stickin' it out until the bitter end. At this point, only the most patient and most loyal remain...and they certainly are not winning over any NEW users.

 

Ah well.

 

Welcome back? :D

 

Thanks! :)

 

I was going to say — I thought they got sold a while ago! This seems ridiculous.

 

I officially returned about a year or so ago, and after sticking around for a few months, I took a hiatus due to my personal life getting a bit hectic. I was really hoping to stick around for good this time around, but it's just completely unbearable right now. I'm impatient on websites that load normally. This is just unacceptable. :thumbsdown:

 

Have they indicated at all whether this will ever be fixed?

 

It has gotten better overtime, however, especially when they switched servers after the company move from viacom to jumpstart. The first jumpstart server just could not handle us all.

 

Like I keep saying, Jumpstart probably hideously underestimated how much of a strain the users put on a server (or servers I guess). I mean, it's not like Neopets is dead. We still have quite a few people visiting the site, especially when they decide to do events like the Charity Corner. Compared to now and late last year it's a marked improvement. Probably as people finally realize various statistics.

 

You think they would've researched a bit more before delving into something that's as ambitious as purchasing a website this large... seems like a silly mistake, but one that should be easily fixed, right? Apparently that's easier said than done.

[hrtbrk]

That's the biggest misconception about this whole server/glitch thing: it's an easy fix. Anyone who semi works with code/servers/computers knows that there is rarely such a thing lol

 

Of course they've stated it will be fixed in time. They are working on it.

[Anime]

To illustrate why it's taking so long to deal with this lag (warning, this is a bit long):

 

To start with, it's very obvious that Jumpstart didn't quite know what they were getting into space wise, so the initial change was suffering from a sheer lack of space (they've since swapped to other server(s) and that helped a LOT).

 

From there, given the point in time that they changed at and the fairly short amount of time between TNT telling us (the users) what was up and it actually happening, I'd bet that they had absolutely no control over when this happened- Viacom made the decision and they just had to roll with it. If they'd had more than a cursory input as to when this move would be, I HIGHLY doubt they'd have chosen to do it less than two months before the Advent. With the flash animations being loaded by basically everyone and more people making a point to get on each day, December is one of the most traffic-heavy months.

 

Various sources (namely Snarkie on her tumblr) have noted that a lot of the TNT staff members left with the move. Some, like Snarkie, left because they felt it was a good time to move their life in a new direction. Some, I'm sure, had contractual obligations to Viacom, and others probably just weren't cool with working for Jumpstart for whatever reason. Whatever their reasons, TNT ended up losing a lot of people with the server move. This meant that until Jumpstart hired more staff (a process than can take months) they were working with a heavily downsized staff. And even when more staff members were/are added, they're all totally unfamiliar with Neopets code and have to be brought up to speed before they can get down to business.

 

So those are the biggest things that the general public understand pretty simply. As you've probably realized by now, those factors alone make for a bit of a mess. Now toss in code issues.

 

Neopets is a very old website. It has been updated and restructured and changed so many times that the code is a giant mess of layer upon layer of different styles and ages of code chunks.

 

Now, this is where I'm going to have a harder time explaining things, but I'll do my best.

 

If you've ever seen code (and if you haven't, just right click any web page and select "view source". I'd suggest Neopets to help illustrate this post), you've probably noted that the various lines have all sorts of tabs before them and spaces between them. There are various ways to do this. Like, let's take for example.... this for loop that I'm going to type up (C++ style, for the curious, so it wouldn't run if you jammed it on a web page but it's an easy way to illustrate this).

for(int i = 0; i <= 5; i++)
{
	cout << i << endl;
}

Pretty simple! It'll print the numbers 0 thru 5 on their own lines. Here's the exact same thing in fully valid formatting:

for(int i = 0; i <= 5; i++) {
	cout << i << endl; }

for(int i = 0; i <= 5; i++)
{cout << i << endl;
}

for(int i = 0; i <= 5; i++)
	cout << i << endl;

(it's just executing one line so you don't even need the curly brackets!)

 

See how having different people code the same thing can quick turn out very, very different? And this is just one tiny for loop! Imagine giant mixes of that from people that haven't touched the site in years all over the place! As you can imagine, it can get real easy to lose track of all sorts of stuff real fast.

 

So, we've got a site that was moved at a poor time, that lost a lot of staff and then had to train up new staff (qualified or no, unless you've been hired to code something from scratch, any programmer will have an initiation to the project's coding language and the existing code before they get going). This mix of old and new staff is having to dive into some rather ancient, mixed up, messy code to find the issues, and then fix them without breaking anything else.

 

I believe I've done a fair job at illustrating that, yes? Now, that's just on the coding side- the software side. The other side of this is the sever itself. The server needs to be optimized to run Neopet's code and process its data as efficiently as possible. Now, I don't know much about the art of server optimization (I'm just a computer science major, servers are hardware and thus computer engineering's realm of expertise), but I do know that it can take a very long time to nudge a server and the code on it into just the right configuration to run well. Do we need more computing power for the shops? Or the BD? Where is that power coming from? Do we need to put that section of the site on server B? Does it have enough available power for that to help? What about server C? And so on and so forth. And every time they make a big change to the code itself, on one hand that can make for massive progress in making various functions and features run better. On the other, that feature may now no longer be on the best possible server spot, or have an efficient amount of processing power dedicated to it.

 

A server move is a lengthy and in-depth thing. It's basically a full-site clean up, all the way to the most ancient core coding on the site- while the site is still live. Most of the time a server move of this scope will happen very gradually- we'll move this part today, and fix it up, and then connect the live site to it. Then this part. And so on till it's all moved over. Neopets didn't have that luxury. It was just "okay you're moving everything right now go." and they have to hastily shove everything over and get it to "technically functional" without having time to try and fix things up as they went. And then they didn't have time to do any tests on the new server- they moved, they lost access to the Viacom servers, the site opened, and people (tons of people) were suddenly trying to interact with the new server.

 

All in all, while this has been a ridiculously messy road, TNT has actually handled this with a fair amount of grace and as much speed as could be expected of them under the circumstances. In 5 months they've gone from a site that was, frankly, unusable and on a wholly untested server, to site that is only laggy and getting better every day. They've also been keeping us reasonably up to date- I know a lot of people think they haven't said enough, but they've told us whenever something major has happened, and they can't really be expected to tell us every little thing they do- for one, that's a lot of really boring things, and two, they'd probably compromise the site's security if they let the less scrupulous among us know exactly what they were fiddling with.

 

I know I managed to lose a lot of people up in the code bit of this post, but I hoped I helped at least some of you understand why this is taking so long.

[Shane for Wax]

 

You think they would've researched a bit more before delving into something that's as ambitious as purchasing a website this large... seems like a silly mistake, but one that should be easily fixed, right? Apparently that's easier said than done.

Indeed, they should have done a bit more research into what they were getting into. I expect that there was almost an eviction notice where Viacom is concerned, which meant they had x amount of time to seal the deal. But also that Jumpstart should have had some idea what they were buying, including server strain and member base.

 

But the issues we are experiencing aren't fixed with a cure-all. As I've mentioned before, often times you have 99 glitches in the code, you fix one, suddenly you have like 110.

 

I think people are misunderstanding when I talk about my frustrations. I'm not demanding a quick fix. Quick fixes tend to break things even further. I'm more asking for it to be recognized there are issues. For this recognition to be published on various fronts such as twitter and facebook. They have multiple ways to communicate with their userbase but they seem to refuse to do so. Or at least refuse to do so in a timely manner. But these are my own opinions and frustrations and I don't expect everyone to share them or completely understand them or even feel that they are warranted. They could have handled it worse, much worse. Perhaps my expectations are simply too high? Who knows. I just know my experiences especially when it comes to server moves.

 

Either way, there really is a very big improvement where the lag is concerned. It feels almost the same speed as it was a couple years ago, in fact. Yes we have our bumps in the road but they're mainly glitches and the lag doesn't seem to get very bad during these recent glitches. The ping tests are good. Honestly in the past two months there has definitely been an almost shocking improvement. But it could simply be coincidence or confirmation bias, as things tend to lag off activity wise when december ends. Correlation and causation and all that. I honestly don't care which though I hope that the servers will be able to handle things especially during altador season.

[Jaavje]

Anime, thank you for the clear explanation!

I can get really annoyed at people, there are quite a few at the Neoboards, who seem to expect that Neopets should just apply a quick fix and everything will be fine.

For my studies I have to do a bit of programming myself and I know how time consuming that can be, so I can imagine how horrible it is for a site like Neopets.

 

I do understand where the frustration is coming from though. Like Shane for Wax says, the communication from the Neopets team is minimal. There are hardly any heads-up as to where they are in their progress. And though I understand it is impossible to set a date where everything is fixed, I think a lot of people would understand the issues better it TNT would just communicate more. They are probably working very hard behind the scenes, but we don't know, because they won't tell us a thing. They sometimes use the editorial to address issues like the lag, but that is in response to a question. I think one of the most important things for a business is the communication and at this moment TNT is, in my opinion, failing to communicate enough. So I must admit, I'm a bit frustrated at them as well...

[jellysundae]

Maybe with all the staff they've lost, setting time aside for someone to play messenger to the userbase gets given low priority. Say if it comes down to doing that or getting a feature out on time and so on. That might explain why the communication's been sporadic; sometimes they have the time, others they don't.

 

Just as an aside, the lag's pretty bad right now, so I wonder what's getting tweaked, something's getting some attention anyway :D Look at it that way, right now lag's a positive thing as it means work is in progress.

[Shane for Wax]

Well TNT has always had staff for this thing and that thing, rarely do the duties overlap. I doubt the programmers or webmasters are the ones reporting the issues to us, but are probably the content staff and such like after being told the issue by the former in terms the latter can report on. It is lower priority than actually getting things fixed, yes. But it would be prudent to warn people of issues so they have less to fix (such as the NP lost during the latest glitch).

[AlissaGoesRAWR]

I think people are misunderstanding when I talk about my frustrations. I'm not demanding a quick fix. Quick fixes tend to break things even further. I'm more asking for it to be recognized there are issues. For this recognition to be published on various fronts such as twitter and facebook. They have multiple ways to communicate with their userbase but they seem to refuse to do so. Or at least refuse to do so in a timely manner. But these are my own opinions and frustrations and I don't expect everyone to share them or completely understand them or even feel that they are warranted. They could have handled it worse, much worse. Perhaps my expectations are simply too high? Who knows. I just know my experiences especially when it comes to server moves.

 

Either way, there really is a very big improvement where the lag is concerned. It feels almost the same speed as it was a couple years ago, in fact. Yes we have our bumps in the road but they're mainly glitches and the lag doesn't seem to get very bad during these recent glitches. The ping tests are good. Honestly in the past two months there has definitely been an almost shocking improvement. But it could simply be coincidence or confirmation bias, as things tend to lag off activity wise when december ends. Correlation and causation and all that. I honestly don't care which though I hope that the servers will be able to handle things especially during altador season.

 

These paragraphs basically summarize my thoughts as a newcomer who just returned to the site this week. I'm by no means a coding expert. I'm basically a newbie to the site in general at this point, too, since I've been gone for so long. I'm not asking for a quick fix, I'm just saying five months or however long it's been seems like an awful long time to let these sort of issues endure. And during a time of "crisis," communication is key above all other things. I'm sure the team is understaffed and in an awkward transition phase, but like you said, it's something that really needs to be more outwardly addressed, in my opinion. I noticed the site was lagging and I started lurking all over their social media accounts and couldn't find any information until I decided to come back here. It was extremely confusing.

 

I guess all I'm saying is I hope this isn't the best it'll be. I hope it does improve, because it was very noticeable to me after returning after a year or so of inactivity.

[jellysundae]

The lag seems less pronounced right at this moment, compared to yesterday's, but then there's going to be less people on at this time of the day.