I've only logged about 45 minutes of Skritter time in the past week. Part of that is my fault, being lazy. Part of that is because my graphics controller went belly-up on Saturday and the computer was in the shop for a few days. However, in addition to those issues, I've been experiencing a fair amount of lag between items, which makes it much easier to fall into laziness - "Oh, look, no new items coming up, well, I'm off to bed then..."

For most of my Skrittering time, I've had some slight lag, particularly when introducing new items, where I would get the animated ellipsis for a second or five. However, more recently, I've been getting notably worse lag, ranging from 5 seconds (low), to around 15 seconds (high-average), with outliers over a minute, including a few times I let Skritter try to load an item for upwards of 5 minutes before simply turning it off. What's more, it's not even slightly limited to new items anymore, but happens as often as every two or three items (though it's not always that bad), making my current pile of 900-plus review items seem insurmountable at times.

Is anyone else experiencing this kind of lag in Skritter? Is it just an ISP issue on my end (2 mbps DSL on China Telecom in Hubei), or is there something more to it?

Ouch, related to my lack of recent study rather than the lag (which I didn't experience for the last 18 minutes of this session, after a rather choppy first seven), my "Characters Learned" graph actually went down today... yikes.

Perhaps it also has something to do with turning on "hide pinyin" for the first time - I definitely use the pinyin as a crutch, but it seemed much harder without it, particularly when the definitions were similar to other words I know (though I have that problem with 连 and 联 and some of the fu's even with pinyin showing, to be fair...)

I am seeing the errors that are causing the ellipses to party all the time. I will try to figure them out and that should make things a lot faster again. They are very frustrating. I'm not sure how many people they are affecting.

Hide pinyin also makes it harder at first, while you "forget" a bunch of characters you "knew", but it should even out before too long.

I think I've finally fixed this bug; a nasty one it was, and I do think it was affecting everyone for the last few weeks (sometimes less, sometimes more).

Please let me know if the issue persists.

Er. I'm not sure if it is. I've just seen a few errors for the first time in a good long while, and Skritter is now permanently stuck on an item (despite the rest of the site loading fine). It's a first...

I am getting this error about every 5-10 items now...a lot of the time I simply reload the practice page because the next word is not loading.

I have gotten permanently stuck multiple times in the last week or so.

How about now?

Darn; it looks like it still isn't completely fixed, although it seems rarer. I will keep trying.

Nick,

I do not know if it is on my side or not, but it is still extremely laggy for me. I practice about 5-10 words and then it hangs indefinitely. The only solution I have found is to reload the page every 5-10 words which is extremely frustrating.

I hope you can fix this soon

Seems to be working better in the last 10 minutes or so...

Well, before I would occasionally get a 5 second lag, now it throws up a server error and gets stuck on items permanently :-/.

I think I got it now. All this trouble and I think all I needed was two words of code, 哎哟!

Google App Engine's datastore falters under demand

"Two weeks after announcing a business version of its Google App Engine application building and hosting service, Google acknowledged that the performance of the product's datastore has been chronically deficient for weeks.

To make up for the recent string of outages, slowdowns and errors, Google is waiving datastore CPU costs retroactively effective to the May 31 bill and until further notice."

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177636/Google_App_Engine_s_datastore_falters_under_demand?source=rss_news

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Are you also affected by the retroactive waiving of datastore CPU costs?

I think that all App Engine apps are, yes. Nice of them to do. As Google dedicates more resources to App Engine, and more people adopt it for their apps, and they continue to develop cool features, good things will happen for Skritter!