Seeing quite a few of these over the last few days, and the usual long pauses of nothing happening.

What's up?

App Engine is seeing general performance problems. A couple weeks ago, I got down deep into Skritter's cogs and reworked the way some of the datastore calls worked, trying to minimize the effect of slow App Engine performance. It was looking like it had helped, but it's hard to tell, since App Engine's system status pages aren't very reliable. And when App Engine takes a huge hit like this, then everyone's latencies (including Skritter's) go up to several seconds, with high error rates, until the spike subsides.

I'm frustrated. Apart from during the past half hour, how many server errors and long pauses have people been seeing in the past few days?

Nick, I have seen this during the last few days almost everyday, not permanently, but quite often. If it's only for 2 or 3 seconds every now and then, I can easily live with this. However, the last 2 - 3 days it went up to 10 - 20 seconds at least 5 - 10 times a day. In addition, in such situations I get reviews of items, I just studied a few seconds ago: not due (0%), This morning, when working on some corrections for the definitions, Skritter didn't take it and I lost my entries.
All over all, it's much better than compared to a few month ago (also the switch to Google Chrome had a positive impact), but still not on a level, which a normal user would expect.

I've also been seeing this a lot this evening since about 7 PST. Very long pauses often followed by a "server error" message. It always recovered eventually, after maybe 20-30 seconds. When things would slow down I would also run into the issue where I was given items I had just studied.

I can see you've done some buffering, often I get a server error while I can still carry on. Other times I carry on but then run into a server error, hit refresh and it throws the last few characters back at me.

If app engine performance never gets any better, is this something you'll just put up with?

It's now becoming more than just a mild irritant.

I'm having trouble now too, on both sites

As I get more time, and as App Engine continues to have lag spikes like this, I will rewrite the code to do more buffering in the future and to fix the bug which gives you the words you've just done again when it reconnects. That should help a lot with practicing, although adding new words and navigating around the site won't be helped.

Usually App Engine will run well for a couple months, then be frustrating for a couple weeks, and then run well again until next time. The pattern varies, but each time I hope that they've gotten more things figured out. The recent changes I made should cut down the effect on Skritter to only those times when they're really hit hard, but we'll see how well I did after more observation.

The App Engine team is certainly hard at work on it, but I'm not sure if it's a configuration problem or whether they just aren't getting enough extra servers fast enough.

I just did my 20 minutes of practice between approximately 9:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. EST and it was painful. I was grateful to see the server error message (I thought my Wacom was busted)but it never seemed to improve. I kept making strokes that did not show up.

I have no idea what App Engine is. Sounds like a mysterious force that may be good or evil.

Yeah I have to say it's already put me off App Engine for some of my own projects.

I'm never sure if it's Skritter or my VPN acting up, (VPN on for other websites I go to during skritter breaks, like facebook) but even with the VPN off and using .cn site things have been wonky recently. Somehow I added 80 items today even though I have a million reviews due and stopped manually adding after 20??