
pondwitch:
god help us
Following up mostly to Maryâs tags:
#how did they not anticipate this???#Pokemon Go
PokemonGoTech is a parody account. It isnât affiliated with Niantic/Nintendo. So those arenât likely to be real numbers.
Itâs 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 (thereâs currently a heat wave over much of the US), tried to play all at once.
For what itâs worth, a highly-respected-by-me sysadmin/devops person (not at Niantic, but people talk) was saying that the scuttlebutt sheâs heard is that itâs 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 âcode is hard to shard across serversâ 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, wasnât so well-designed that it could actually scale smoothly all the way up to the current level of demand.
So thatâs a software issue, and getting it diagnosed, fixed, tested, and deployed is the kind of thing thatâs going to take more time than just turning up a dial.
I suspect that the âbugsâ of the Nearby tray in the app becoming random/useless and the capture location maps no longer loading are in fact intentional steps theyâve taken to lessen the demands of the application. That is, theyâve intentionally degraded the game by turning those features off in order to lessen the systemâs back end requirements while they scramble to fix the larger problem.
Itâs probably going to take at least a while longer before things are running smoothly. I appreciate what theyâre doing to keep things afloat as best they can in the meantime. Iâve always liked walking around outside, so if I end up having to put my phone away and enjoy reality unaugmented, thatâs okay with me. :-)
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2a2E7gD.