Our server has been slammed by traffic from people around the world as they stay at home with nothing to do.

In fact, our traffic is growing so quickly that it threatens to take down the servers altogether.

So, I am starting to optimize things pretty heavily -- removing "unnecessary" images in high trafficed places.

There is nothing wrong with your browser -- the images aren't there. They will appear again once things calm down!

Thanks for understanding

Terry

  hmm, do you have enough spanners in your toolbox?

Thanks, Terry, for keeping us going.

Hmm... I haven't even noticed anything. Which pages are affected?

P.S. Thanks.

It's a periodic thing; yesterday, midday, the homepage was particularly noticeable (no images except the logo). It will be switched on and off manually depending on traffic.

Ah, okay. I didn't notice that. The times I have been playing must be low-traffic times.

Yup-- in ideal circumstances, as the site expands a little bit more behind the scenes to take on more traffic, the switch needs less flicking.

The League scores do not match up with the actual scores. They seem to be a day behind though I do not have conclusive data. Could this be a caching issue where the daily update is not functioning correctly?

Yes, I noticed the same yesterday, although think it eventually caught up with the correct data?

This has been going on for a few days. It's a problem with many of the "My Team" results pages, for some but not all of the hourly games. When I click on the link on some of those pages, it will take me to a different league page, or highlight names from another team. Clicking on any of A, B, C or D on some of the Top 200 pages will only display one of the leagues regardless of which link is clicked.

For the actual scores, those pages still show the previous day's results. It corrects itself sometime during the night - usually fine by the time I start to play in the morning.

It's active right now. Today's traffic is the highest we have seen in 15 years. Crazy.

Here's a fun fact: right now we are getting MORE daily traffic from the UK than we are from the US. Crazy. Guess they like their trivia over there, lol.

Everyone is celebrating my 6th anniversary on Fun Trivia :-)

I think it's probably an addiction Terry, and we're missing nights out at the pub quizzes!

I'm not able to play Quick Quiz because of high demand B.S I.m trying to get to 40.000 just wondering are the non-paying guests causing this?

It's back again now, so it wasn't unavailable for long. Remember that those 'non-paying guests' may become fully paid up members if they have the chance to play and try out the site. If they can't play at all, they'll never join and the site might disappear for all of us.

Exactly this; this site does take on a LOT of non-paying players and guests, and to bar them out from participating in games (especially low-traffic ones like Quick Quiz) is the easiest way to squash any longevity in their stays and the site as a whole.

If Quick Quiz is the one thing that needs to take a hit to optimize right now in light of the huge amount of traffic we've been getting, then that's a very small price to pay, especially when it's not an explicitly GM-specific game.


To add: Without optimizing presently, the alternative is letting site traffic push to the point where FT crashes and we have to bring the server back up. This doesn't solve the problem. It will crash again when the site gets the traffic back. Until the proper solutions can be put in place, optimization is key.

To help alleviate the frustration some Gold members are experiencing, maybe it's time for a GM-only version of the Quick Quiz. There used to be a regular and a Gold InstaQuiz, so maybe the same could be done for the Quick Quiz.

How often does this happen? I've had no problem whenever I want to play.

I am going to note here that Quick Quiz is not a high priority game, which is one of the reasons it's the first to take a hit when anything happens. To introduce a new version of the game for the very minimal people standing by it is a diversion of resources from the traffic problems we are currently tackling.

If the site goes down because of traffic, none of the games are going to be playable while it is down, even a GM Quick Quiz game.

If the site is up and you see no Quick Quiz, it's because we needed to take it down temporarily or else nothing would be up.

As Terry has noted, our traffic has not seen these peaks since 2005. Please trust that we are doing what we can (and what we have to) to roll with the punches.





Based on Feedback, just when it's been mentioned in this thread, and since the traffic spike commenced last week, not for very long.

I still think a Gold version of Quick Quiz, like the Gold version of Instaquiz, would be a nice thing to have.

Speaking of traffic, if the number of visits by guests is going up, is there a corresponding increase in new registrations?

Quick Quiz is already set up to give Gold members an advantage:

Yes, but I don't have exact numbers; new registrations are still visible from the Buzz page.