Hello all. Below is a message I've been asked to pass along to you from the head of our programming team. --Bryan

To all players out there – I’ll start by saying that we dropped the ball on this one. We take pride in high availability of our site and realizing that an issue of this magnitude was allowed to fester for months was a hard blow for the team.

More frustrating is that it has taken far too long to address. Neither the response nor the response time meets PokerStars’ high standards. There’s simply no excuse.

Let me try to recap for you briefly what happened, how we have responded and what the current status is. The issue was brought to my attention on Dec 18th and immediately the team of developers covering different areas started poring over available information. The posts on 2+2, while sometimes harsh, provided very valuable leads for us to follow. The log files, generously provided by players, gave us a lot of data necessary to pinpoint the problem. This particular issue was quite hard to track down as that it was gradual degradation of the service, rather than outright failure, and it managed to fly under the radar of our monitoring tools that keep track of over 40,000 parameters from about 3,300 server modules in real time.

By January 7th the root of the problem affecting MTTs was tracked down to a software change made in May of 2015. The change was well intended, but it had high performance impact in a particular scenario, when multiple big tournaments with large late registration periods start at the same time.

As a first response, some of the tournament start times were staggered by PRM team. This change took place Friday Jan 08 and had positive effect over the weekend of Jan 09-10.

At the restart on Jan 14th a software fix was deployed. During the weekend of Jan 16-17 most players reported that the lag in MTTs is gone.

As we were investigating this problem, we discovered another issue, affecting SAG/SNG. Those tournaments were not distributed evenly across the servers causing load levels close to capacity at peak time and a multitude of delays (not related to the original MTT issue). On Jan 15th the distribution problem was fixed and we can see on our monitoring tools that delays related to SAG/SNG have dramatically decreased.

We have also identified faulty network card in one of the machines handling players connections. While only about 5% of players are using this machine at any given time, the experience for those players was considerably worse than average. The machine has been taken out of service.

At the moment we are reconfiguring placement of MTTs across our servers to even out MTT load and are tweaking tournament schedule to avoid simultaneous starts of large tournaments. Those additional measures will allow us to use existing capacity most efficiently. We have also added additional alerts to the monitor and will continue to work on this until we are positive that performance meets Stars standards. We still need your help to make sure we can put those issues behind us.

Additional client side Quality of Service monitoring measures will be deployed with upcoming client release and will provide us with better view of what happens from player’s perspective. Design work has been started to create a better mechanism of distributing tournament load across the servers. Stay tuned.

Nice one

Good start, but why don't you add more servers?

If you can't handle 225k players online at the same time, then outsource the hosting to Amazon or someone.

good to hear , definitely been an improvement lately

lagging pretty hard today bryan...

Speaking solely as a professional player: having three tournaments start at :27 :30 and :33 is much better for me than having them all thrown at me at :30 during peak times.

Now, for a recreational player this change is a minor inconvenience, round numbers are naturally easier to remember. Not sure if this will impact traffic even in the slightest. So, please try to track any differences and consider changing to this system of scheduling permanently, please.

Sorry you're experiencing lag. Thank you for letting us know. Could you please provide a few details to help us investigate?

What game types were you playing, how many tables and at what time today? Can you describe the nature of the lag, how it affected your play?

Which client version are you running? Please go to Help > About PokerStars and look for the 5-digit Build number in the upper right.

If you experience lag again, please send your log files to support. Go to Help > Log Files, explain in the text box that you are having lag, provide as much detail about the nature of the lag and your situation as you can, then click Send Log Files.

Lagging today, a few times already.

Very Very lagging today. I could't even play one table Zoom poker. When I was during a hand, the table screen could stop for minutes and at the end I was forced to fold my hand and lost money out of any of my control. And it happened every few hand in Zoom poker.

Twice stars has frozen since yest while everything else worked. Had to kill and restart client. Also been mentioned in mtt thread by others.

yup, whole thing just freezes. Happened 4 times for me today. Have to restart the client everytime. Will send log files after sessions. Playing lots of sats, so cost me a fair amount of money.

Also a victim to client crashing, it happened to me the other day aswell, thought it was just my laptop, but nope seems to be occurring to a few of my other friends also. Annoying

Make that twice now , love this

Yep happened 2x for me also

This also, was going to post earlier words to this effect.

There is even a NVG thread which is about a year old on the stars lag.

yeah its **** annoying, it looks like its a .uk problem, all my uk mates are suffering also, maybe other .xx sites too and not .com (asjbaaafs credit for spotting this)

same here

I didn't face any major lag before December. Only recently I faced lag on sundays every 15th min during peak hrs.

ya 6 times now, had to unreg all sats, pretty ****ty for a coop sunday. Doesn't seem like all UK players are being affected.

lol stars just froze/crashed on me all tables. timebanks gone everywhere ffs



so much fun

lagging for me too

I suspect that you may need to re-read the first line of the post. The first line is from me, introducing the content below. The entire rest of the post is written by the head of our programming team, and he's describing the issue as an overall thing with a clear cause/effect. I pasted it to TwoPlusTwo by request.

Honestly, I really don't think there's any reason to be questioning my integrity. I do not lie, for many different reasons, not least of which that it's just not necessary to do so in pretty much any circumstance ever. We can agree to disagree on matters of fact and matters of opinion, but I see no need to cross the line into insults. There is no need for us to be at odds at all, in fact. Whether it seems like it at all times or not, we have the same goals... to enjoy excellent tournament poker, with me and my colleagues providing it, you and your fellow players participating in it. There are some issues on which we don't see eye to eye, but those need not get in the way of reasonable discussion.

Ahh, I mis-read. Thought you were stating you hadnt heard about it till Dec.

It goes without saying that you guys not having someone in the programming department look into it until 6months+ into it is beyond absurd.

Also while that post may not have contained any lies by you, there have been multiple times over the last few years where you have made statements that were either strongly misleading intentionally or ended up being entirely false.

So dont act as though you have treated us players with respect and honesty at all times.

Just wow.

Not even an apology?

For example?

anuj please stop
if you want a job working with amayastars...just ask or send in yur cv.