Crashing servers & Abandoned Games

Anyone have insight/opinions/ anecdotes on this topic? 

I was playing a 45 minute match when the servers crashed. I got booted off and got the ever so friendly [Too many reloads, please try again in 2 minutes] but somehow managed to get back on in time and make a move. My opponent apparently didn't reload the page as furiously as I did and lost due to abandoned game. 

It's happened to me once before and it was pretty disheartening. In a bullet or even blitz match it's a bummer but in a 30, 45+ match losing during the endgame especially if you're up is a tough pill to swallow.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a game paused feature when the disconnection is due to server failure?

How do you know it was a server failure?

I went to the Help and Support chat on "Live" and saw I wasn't alone. Confirmation through numbers.

The post wasn't intended to be read in a fatalist spirit. I'm just curious to see if there could be a solution. Worth giving it some attention in my opinion.

I'm assuming it wasn't a server failure but a network issue. If the Live server had failed, the games most likely would have been completely gone. Unless, they have some kind of built in transaction system that will reload games after a crash or maybe some replication going on to a secondary Live process.

In that case, the Live server wouldn't really know that there was an issue, just that there were a number of disconnections. Guess, they could add code to look for something like that and pause, at least until the first player get reconnected or some threshold is reached.

Oh, I was refreshing like a mad man too lol

You are never alone, there are always people. Thats the world you live in and not at all a reason to assume its a server failure

I'll rephrase. I was not alone in being booted from the game, unable to log back on and the game being terminated for a disconnect. Apart from the people in Chat my opponent also stated the same issue. What would be your diagnosis?

u r correct! In the end I've read many postings regarding such or similar problems ...

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/help-support/seem-to-loose-connection-when-playing-chess-only-ip-attack

See post 9, from yesterday, posted by @erik. Likely related (and posted after my previous reply or I hadn't seen it yet).

Crashing servers, and the "server is being restarted" message have been puzzling me since I joined this website. Modern web technology allows clustering/pooling of sessions and data, and even load balancing as well as seamless releasing of updates. I understand that live chess is a difficult product, but I am confident these crashing/rebooting servers are really unnecessary.  It surprises me that so many paying members are just accepting this.

A pause feature would be the wrong angle to tackle this problem.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not tech savvy at all so the layman term pause is probably way off. It does seem quite a shame that people lose matches over it. Perhaps something is in the works to fix it. Here's hoping.

I recall experiencing a red splash screen msg when I logged on about the following, referencing Amazon Cloud Servers down around Feb 28th, 2017 (as well as having seen other dates in various online articles, ...not sure if contemporaneous with your issue). The story was later reported on NPR, as "human error" occurring in an attempt to reboot and individual Server. Ok, 😳. Amazon is apparently one of the nations largest providers of Cloud Service computing, providing 30% on this service to businesses across the nation. See:

"Amazon's Cloud Service Has Outage, Disrupting Sites
from the outage-report dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report on USA Today:
Portions of Amazon Web Services, the nation's largest cloud computing company, went offline Tuesday afternoon, affected multiple companies across the United States but especially on the east coast. The outage appeared to have begun around 12:45 pm ET. It was centered in AWS' S3 storage system on the east coast. Many of the services that firms use AWS are for back-end processes, and therefore not immediately visible to consumers, though the outage could disrupt customer-facing activities like logins and payments.
At least some websites that appear to be affected are: Airbnb, Down Detector, Freshdesk, Pinterest, SendGrid, Snapchat's Bitmoji, Time, Buffer, Business Insider, Chef, Citrix, CNBC, Codecademy, Coursera, Cracked, Docker, Expedia, Expensify, Giphy, Heroku, Home Chef, iFixit, IFTTT, isitdownrightnow.com, Lonely Planet, Mailchimp, Medium, Microsoft's HockeyApp, News Corp, Quora, Razer, Slack, Sprout Social, Travis CI, Trello, Twilio, Unbounce, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Zendesk.

The dashboard of Amazon Web Services, which tracks the status of the service, is unable to change color, Amazon said. It is because the status dashboard also runs on the service that is down."

http://m.slashdot.org/story/323057

As far as the scope of service Amazon Servers provide (note even SEC above), on the same date and reporting on the same outage, the following from from Los Angeles Times:

"Amazon launched Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing service, in 2006. Today it is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure services, with over a third of the $10.8-billion market, according to research firm Canalys.

More than 1 million clients use the service, according to Amazon, including established corporations such as GE, start-ups such as Snap, and government agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

This is a question for chess.com technical support team, but I surmise (though admittedly uncertain) the issues are related. Hope this sheds useful light on the issue LaGuillotine 😊!

zeno