There's weird things going on between connections between client Flash and the server, which is causing loading to poop out sometimes until you refresh the page, or sometimes review times might not get saved (won't corrupt anything, though).

I'm working on this bug, but its impenetrable obstinacy makes for slow going, and I haven't defeated it tonight.

Tomorrow, I'll have at it once more and will gallumph around with its head. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks for your hard work!

Impenetrable obstinacy doesn't sound good. I hope it doesn't cause you too much strife!

:) tnk

In the complete absence of any of the proper error handling events being fired, I'm trying limiting it to 3 active Flash-server connections.

I'm not sure if this will eliminate the problem, or just (hopefully at least) greatly reduce it. Since loading hanging until refresh isn't going to happen nearly as often, please keep an eye out and tell me if it does.

Well, that didn't work, either. I've just uploaded another fix, still using three connections but now putting more requests in each instead of waiting for each request to return. I think the problem is that some requests aren't returning, with no way to track them because of some bugs in Flash.

If I'm right, you should still see some hanging, but it'll be much rarer than before and things should be very usable.

Please let me know if this matches with your experience, or if there are still problems.

Still problems - need to reload page sometimes.

This used to happen before sometimes, it seems to be happening more now.

Happening quite a lot, maybe once every 4 or 5 characters need to reload.

Same thing here, happens quite often

I'd say it's happening significantly more often than it was a week. Maybe a week ago it was every 100 or so characters you'd see this, now it's regularly.

囧

How about now? I'm trying something else.

Much better - seems to be faster and tried it for a while without seeing the issue.

I just went through 30 mn with only one bug.
Haven't noticed any slowdown.

Okay. I patched it for now by having it retry requests after 11 seconds (where 10 seconds is the normal timeout period), so the dropped requests will just take extra time to complete.

Normally, you won't notice when it happens if it has loaded far enough in advance, but if you're going fast (through a bunch of tones, for example), or adding new words (which takes longer), try giving it more time to load and let me know if that fixes it now or if refreshes are still necessary.

It paused, apart form a lot of activity in the status bar, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. Waiting up to a minute before reloading hasn't helped too much, I've tried reloading a couple of times - still nothing. I'll try logging out and in again now, as it still hasn't come back after a few minutes.

I'm back in. A "Google Server Error" just appeared in the bottom part of the screen (comments box)... that may have something to do with it. The only other thing I can think of is that this happened when I got to the end of the review queue.

More server errors :(

Definitely seems to be a problem adding new items for me at the moment. Whenever I get to the end of the review queue it's giving up - no more characters, lots of activity in the status bar with no results.

Going to try adding another list.

That seems to have helped... was at the end of HSK 1 and it wasn't adding the last 7 or so characters. Now added HSK 2 and it's started adding the remaining HSK 1 as well as HSK 2.

But not for long, back to not loading any new characters at all. Think I'm going to call it a day. Good luck with the bugs.

I'm working on fixing this and may have stumbled across something that would explain why I can't reproduce it like you guys are seeing. There appears to be some sort of bug affecting timeout handling for App Engine on external domains (here skritter.com), where it works on internal domains (here skrit.appspot.com).

I'll do some more testing, but I'd appreciate it if you guys could try practicing directly on skrit.appspot.com for a while and tell me if you still see the problems. (If you log in, it may redirect you to skritter.com, but just go back to skrit.appspot.com and practice there).

Thanks! I'll keep this thread updated when we figure more of this out.

Actually, it looks like if you used Clickpass to sign in, you won't be logged in to skrit.appspot.com. We'll work on this. If you want to practice on skrit.appspot.com for now, you'll have to make a password to get there.

Okay, fixed the Clickpass login, so now when you sign in you should be logged into both skrit.appspot.com and skritter.com. If you're still not logged in there, logout and log back in and you should be good to go.

I have the same problem on "http://skrit.appspot.com/practice" after 40/50 chars/tone with "2/3" flash value

Ugh, really? I can reproduce the problem on skritter.com but not on skrit.appspot.com so I was really hoping that was it. There could be two implacable bugs running rampantly roughshod around here, I guess.

Please, I need more users' experiences on skrit.appspot.com to see if it's doing the same thing. We've fixed one bug that was causing random-seeming "Server error! We're on it." messages to pop up (when you did a word with the same character twice in it, really fast).

I have a problem where after the number of reviews goes to 0, Skritter hangs while querying the server. When I reload, it will load one new word or if new reviews have timed in, give them. I tried skrit.appspot.com and had the same problem. I had a little success by going to the vocabulary list and manually adding a bunch of words at once, which got it to give me many new words.

Also, I was trying to get Skritter to add the corrected traditional radicals (which were fixed in one of the recent changes). First, I tried pausing all my lists except radicals, which just made it hang as above. Then, I tried adding them by hand to no apparent effect; this is in contrast to adding by hand above, which did make the new words appear after reload. Then, I tried resetting the add position to the beginning of the list. This made the status bar quickly run through the whole list and stop halfway from the end of the last segment, but didn't actually prompt any of the characters to appear. I'm not sure if this is related to the other loading bug, but maybe it helps.

I'm having the same problems as Xerxes314. Once my number of reviews gets to zero, no new words get added. I see 'Waiting for skrit.appspot.com' etc in the status bar, but nothing happening. If I leave the Practise page and come back to it, I'll be given one or two new words then things stop again.

I'm having trouble reproducing this new bug. I fixed some errors that were being thrown, though; they may have been causing problems. Are you both still having such issue?

Aha, found that bug and it should be fixed now. It was happening when you got to the end of the list, so it wasn't happening often. Now, back to the doombug!

I just fixed a bug that was causing normal timeouts to behave like the doombug, so timeout clusters may have been causing some of the problems we've been seeing.

Reports confirm that the doombug only happens on skritter.com, which helps a lot in us debugging it with the Google team. Thanks for your help, everyone!

Maybe to soon to celebrate, but I just spent a good 30 mn on skritter.com saw no sign of the doombug.
(though I did not make it to the end of my - HUGE - review list. I know issues sometimes happen when new words are added).

skrit.appspot.com works just fine too.

Good luck to the Skritter team.