pondwitch:

god help us

Following up mostly to Mary’s tags:

#how did they not anticipate this???#Pokemon Go

PokemonGoTech is a parody account. It isn’t affiliated with Niantic/Nintendo. So those aren’t likely to be real numbers.

It’s true the game has been down a fair amount, especially at times of high activity. The last bad meltdown was Saturday morning on the US east coast, when the bulk of the US trainer population, having looked forward all week to getting some quality Go time in on their day off before it got too hot (there’s currently a heat wave over much of the US), tried to play all at once.

For what it’s worth, a highly-respected-by-me sysadmin/devops person (not at Niantic, but people talk) was saying that the scuttlebutt she’s heard is that it’s not really a server-scaling issue, because the server side of PGo is running in the Google Cloud and if it was just a question of spinning up more servers that would be easy. It is, rather, a “code is hard to shard across servers” issue; i.e., a software design limitation. In still other words, the system, while clearly doing some pretty impressive things in terms of handling a mind-boggling amount of activity, wasn’t so well-designed that it could actually scale smoothly all the way up to the current level of demand.

So that’s a software issue, and getting it diagnosed, fixed, tested, and deployed is the kind of thing that’s going to take more time than just turning up a dial.

I suspect that the “bugs” of the Nearby tray in the app becoming random/useless and the capture location maps no longer loading are in fact intentional steps they’ve taken to lessen the demands of the application. That is, they’ve intentionally degraded the game by turning those features off in order to lessen the system’s back end requirements while they scramble to fix the larger problem.

It’s probably going to take at least a while longer before things are running smoothly. I appreciate what they’re doing to keep things afloat as best they can in the meantime. I’ve always liked walking around outside, so if I end up having to put my phone away and enjoy reality unaugmented, that’s okay with me. :-)

Reposted from http://ift.tt/2a2E7gD.

Tags: tumblr lies, Pokemon, niantic, devops, google cloud.

This entry was posted by jbc on Monday, July 18th, 2016 at 10:52 am and is filed under Tumblr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.