Current conditions at ~5:50pm EST ... no table lag




May check out table conditions later on - oh, or may not, since the Pyramid promo is over ...

Didn't even manage to complete the Pyramid yesterday - only got in 120 hands in 4hrs of play

6:25 pm EST, no table lag in UK:

Was able to check without playing - slightly worse than before. Usually when the connections are like this, the tables are playable ... not laggy, but slower than any other site ...




If someone at PS made the decision to pare down service at night to save costs, wouldn't surprised if they're losing money in the net ...

Guess they also keep rake really high though, when it seems like they must make more in the net when they give more rewards back via promos ...

Doubt either's likely to change :/

What do you mean by "losing money in the net"? Are you referring to PokerStars' net profit or do you mean the cost of maintaining the connections to all players worldwide?

I was surprised earlier in the thread when you wrote "the connections are mostly showing as bad, most of the time..." - are you saying your province [or the town/city where you live] is often not good over the years for PokerStars' internet connection, but fine for other poker sites over the years?

Do you depend on the U.S. East Coast PokerStars host for your service? That's been showing as around 36% in all your pictures

I would suppose that PokerStars uses the transatlantic undersea fibre-optic cables from UK to New Jersey which is fast - it looks like the problem for you is from NJ [or wherever on U.S. West Coast] to Canada. I have no idea how they make that last little bit of the trip. Perhaps satellite & that's where they've shaved costs? I'm not into telecoms so I'm guessing of course...

Stars has a host down since 1 month.

Those servers aren't all Pokerstars, just ping tests to servers in those locations. Manx telecom is their ISP but given the amount of DDoS attacks on gambling sites it probably rejects unexpected ping requests. Mine has been 0% for Manx Telecom for a while and no issues.

General Note About the Network Status Panel

There is some confusion among players about the Network Status Panel, which unfortunately raises more questions than it answers for many people. It is a bit of geekiness from the very early days of PokerStars and is not intuitive or explained well in the UI, in my opinion (build by geeks for geeks ).



Most people think those are all PokerStars server locations around the world, but they are not. Instead, they are a sampling of high-volume public websites in the various locations indicated - completely unrelated to PokerStars servers (with the obvious exception being the PokerStars Website on IOM).

Also contrary to popular belief, the Status panel is not showing how well or badly the servers in those locations are handling their traffic loads. Instead, as The Imp mentioned, the panel shows the results of ping tests from your computer to those servers. I believe that the Network Status function pings several well-known websites in a given region and averages the responses into an overall status.

So what the Network Status Panel indicates is whether or not there are network traffic problems between you and various points on the globe. If there is poor connectivity, the problem could lie anywhere between your computer and the servers in a particular location, on any number of hops. It could be a problem very local to you, at your ISP, somewhere along the way or at the servers themselves.

It's a relatively crude tool, but it saves Support the trouble of asking you to try manually pinging a bunch of websites around the globe when you are experiencing disconnects or lag effects.

It is important to understand that there are no hard and fast rules for interpreting the data. If all other locations are at 100% and PS Website shows 0%, it does not necessarily mean that our servers are down or unable to handle loads. It just means that a ping test between your computer and our website failed, and there could be any number of reasons for that - only one of which would be a possible problem with our servers (but unlikely).

We don't use Network Status Panel data from clients to diagnose server problems as we have far more sophisticated monitoring systems in our data centers to track server loads and performance.

If some sites are good and some bad, it could indicate a problem with your ISP (among other possibilities), and if all are bad it could indicate a problem with your network connection / setup (again, among other possibilities).

So, the Network Status Panel is a bit like a heartbeat - it can show whether the patient (network connectivity in this case) is alive or dead, but doesn't really indicate where the problem is.

Some players have suggested that PokerStars has cut back on servers or pares down on service at night to save costs. Anyone familiar with the online gaming business would know these are not practical tactics. Our goal is to facilitate as much play per minute as possible, 24x7, and putting any technical or service-level brakes on the flow of data would be counterproductive - bad for players and bad for our business.

==============

It seems like a lot of your 'detailed' analyses tends to come at things from your perspective? I mean like you overlooked the fact that other sites (including poker sites) are all working fine when Stars is lagging - which would eliminate local service as the issue.

The connection indicator isn't really the issue - the lag is. And if it's not local service that's causing the lag, and if there's no pared down service at night (because it's not feasible) ... what are the other possibilities?

@Keith
Thank you for responding to this thread
I understand a lot more now

Sam asks some good questions there
I would like to know why 3 people see the Manx ping at 0%?
I have just checked mine & it's still 0% for Manx

It doesn't mean the server's not working, more likely it's choosing not to respond.

You read something into my question that isn't there, I never claimed the server wasn't working. I've read your previous post [thank you] & Keith's.

Nevertheless I'm curious to know the answer
It seems strange to me to have a pingback tool with one of the targets set to NOT pingback - how are we supposed to help diagnose faults using this tool when a crucial link isn't conversing & saying "hi Loki how ya doin'?"

Tbh the tool should probably be hidden from users and only included in log files, seems to cause too much confusion. You're right that Stars should probably remove Manx Telecom if it's not responsive but it's probably not going to be high on the development list.

Hi, Sam -

Yes, I purposefully overlooked that fact. My short post was not intended to discuss all possible sources of lag. As the title suggests, I was specifically addressing the widespread confusion / common misconceptions about the Network Status Panel.

I kept to that narrow focus because I will doubtless encounter other players in the future who will post screenshots of their Network Status Panel along with suppositions about what the data indicate, and I want to be able to link to my post that addresses just the panel.

Regarding lag, there are many possible sources. Very, very rarely will it turn out to be a server performance or capacity issue or something to do with the data center. Far more typically it is temporary network congestion, or some interaction with 3rd party tools or another program running concurrently or anti-virus software, or an issue with computer graphics, drivers, memory, configuration, operating system updates, memory leaks, etc., or, yes, sometimes a problem with our client software. There are other potential sources of lag (the above is not intended to be an exhaustive list), some very much dependent on individual system setups and usage (tables open, games played, features engaged, etc.) - which is why log files are often useful in trying to resolve reports of lagging.

Temporary network congestion may still be a factor even when other sites are working fine, as the hops to the servers for those sites are probably not the same hops to our servers. Chronic lag (as opposed to occasional/intermittent lag) is less likely to be due to temporary network congestion, but congestion can still be a factor (one of many) in why one player experiences lag and another doesn't. It's not always the primary reason, but could be a contributing factor.

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. It's good to post reports of lag here in this thread, as it may induce others to do the same and maybe we can find some commonality that will point to a source. But it's also important to work with Support, sending logs when you experience lagging and provide as much detail as possible to further the investigation. In the past, when we had lag that affected more than just a few players (and was ultimately resolved by code changes in our client), getting videos from players showing how the lag behaved was quite helpful in pointing our investigators in the right direction.

Thanks, Imp! I'm inclined to agree about the tool being hidden and, yes, we need to take another pass at which sites we are pinging - but it isn't a high priority for development so we are unlikely to get any traction there at the moment.

Manx Telecom was fine for me last week, but now it's bad. My US East Coast connection is also bad, but I'm closer to that than to the US West Coast or Sydney, both of which are 100%, which illustrates the vagaries of router hops between client computers and various servers. It's not a logical, linear time/distance phenomenon, which is why it is so confusing for most people (myself included ).

Server Restart on Thursday, 14-July at 7am ET

FYI - We have just been informed that we should expect a server restart this Thursday at 7am ET. It is planned to take under an hour, but circumstances can sometimes extend or delay it.

Really appreciate the candor Keith

Think we've all had a little bit of exposure to stuff like taking programming courses in school, dealing with technical issues on a home PC scale - and from even those small experiences, can then appreciate that at your level of managing an international system, things must be exponentially more complex, and therefor all that much more difficult to debug, with lots of puzzles, etc.

Appreciate your efforts

Oh, sometimes read posts backwards (from the bottom up), so just saw this lol ...

Okay, will try and wait for the lag to become more pronounced to record a vid - will also open up other sites, so there's that to compare things with. My system resources seem to be fine, but will have to try turning off my anti-virus to see if that makes a difference. Guess could also turn off my HUD as well.

Was going to take my annual Summertime break from the tables soon though, so will see how things are like in September (unless there's a promo in August) ... hopefully the lag'll be gone by then, so won't have to make the video lol ...

Thanks, Keith

Thanks, Sam! I really appreciate your perspective and understanding, too!

Here's hoping your summer break is fun/relaxing and all is well when you hit the tables this fall!

Thanks so much Keith!!

Am sure it will be a nice break - my nephews are coming in a couple of weeks, so am busy preparing some stuff for their visit. It's amazing that they can do so many things, even though they're still so young - the 4 year-old knows all the different NFL football teams, which auntie thought was amazing! Was watching him write up a little scoreboard for a Pittsburgh vs Denver game or whoever last time he was here though ... and guess he's still writing by sound? So his scorecard said 'Fisper' vs 'Denvrr' ... am hoping to make a little placemat for him out of this pic ...



Stuff like that - it should be a nice change of pace


Hope everybody has a really nice summer as well!! See everybody in September!!

can't open up the client right now :/

Is anyone else having problems? I am able to open the .com client.

@Ledders - please contact Support from the email address you have registered to your Stars Account. My colleagues there should be able to help you resolve whatever issue is keeping the client from opening.

I assume it was a random incident. My connection to the Isle of Man was 0% for a couple of hours this evening.

Nobody else on here seems to have experienced it, and a search on twitter showed only one other person tweet the same problem at pokerstars.

Anybody else having issues on the east coast? Network status for me is showing 8% only for east coast, and 0% for Isle of Man

working perfectly on my phone.. guessing its on the wifi im on... at a public library... using my laptop though.