Hi,
I'm now in China in 浙江省 for work and I'm practicing with skritter at about 13:30 UTC.
Yesterday everything was ok. Today the practice page is quite slow to load and it's uncomfortable to use this way.
I'm in a hotel room, I've tested the connection speed at www.speedtest.net with a HongKong server. The result is ping 426 ms, download speed 7.83Mb/s, upload speed 0.78Mb/s. I can load other websites with any trouble.
Is the website slow speed due to the skritter server? Are other users in different countries experiencing the same problem?

Do you have some suggestion about the way to understand if the problem is in the connection or in the skritter server?

I have the same problems from time to time both from Sweden, China and Japan. Usually sitting at hotels with at least 10 Mb/sec and a latency between 50 and 400 Ms. Right now I am home with a 100 Mb line and a latency of 140 Ms. I am sitting and studying with my doughter and i have to refresh the page very often due to old strokes not getting removed, not all content loaded or "error on page" problems. From Sweden the problems are not that bad but from China I do have much more problems. I where recently in the US and there I did not have those problems.

Starting about two hours ago, there seems to be a hiccup with Google's hosting, which I hope they will resolve promptly. You can see the problem here:

http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/serving/2009/06/18#ae-trust-detail-helloworld-get-latency

We don't have a way of crediting everyone's accounts for downtime at this point, but I've added an extra day for each of you for the inconvenience. Anyone else trying to practice during this doldrum can post here or send a feedback.

Sorry about this!

I think that the problem is more common that you are aware of. Yes, now it is more slow than normal but the hickups at least I have most days from time to time. It is not that bad but We do have to refresh the pages at least a couple of times every night due to content not loaded or old stokes not cleared. This is happening on all my pc:s/ servers and in all countries I visit exept for the US so i think that the latency is playing a part here. When i sit in Japan and practice from a corporate network with slow lines the problems are much greater. For me this is not a problem and i Think that my doughter just is using this as an excuse to not have to sit and study;-) By the way. In IE 8 we do have always have an script error now adays that looks like this:.


Meddelande: Expected ')'
Rad: 319
Tecken: 47
Kod: 0
URI: http://www.skritter.com/practice


Meddelande: Expected ')'
Rad: 320
Tecken: 47
Kod: 0
URI: http://www.skritter.com/practice


Meddelande: Expected ')'
Rad: 367
Tecken: 47
Kod: 0
URI: http://www.skritter.com/practice


Meddelande: Expected ')'
Rad: 368
Tecken: 47
Kod: 0
URI: http://www.skritter.com/practice


Meddelande: Expected ')'
Rad: 49
Tecken: 47
Kod: 0
URI: http://www.skritter.com/practice


Meddelande: Expected ')'
Rad: 50
Tecken: 47
Kod: 0
URI: http://www.skritter.com/practice


Meddelande: Expected ')'
Rad: 97
Tecken: 47
Kod: 0
URI: http://www.skritter.com/practice


Meddelande: Expected ')'
Rad: 98
Tecken: 47
Kod: 0
URI: http://www.skritter.com/practice

Sorry, the text is in Swedish but I do get the same from an English server as well. Works fine in both firefox and Chrome, both latest versions.

On a related note... the Skritter homepage hasn't loaded for me properly since around the time that polls were supposedly added. I only say supposedly because I have never successfully gotten one to load on my page :) I blame the old great wall...

Hmm. I'm going to try switching our proxy setup to "faster but more vulnerable to GFW switching things up", and see if that helps the latency-related bugs.

I'll work on the IE8 practice page bug. Does it happen on page load, and does it actually stop anything from working?

I see that the GFW is blocking the polls in a brutal way. I haven't fixed it, but I've perhaps made it slightly better? Please try again and tell me whether the home page finishes loading (sans poll).