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Timing Bug Fixes

August 17, 2008 at 07:00PM
In Vying Games, Announce 		By eki
3 Comments

Just a quick note: this afternoon I released a new version of the server that includes a few timing related bug fixes. These were bugs that effected a very small handful of games, but were fairly severe.

Undo Timeout Bug

Thanks to Hypatia for reporting this bug! This bug was introduced in the previous release which tied the last move timestamp to the game's history. Unfortunately, undo and undo by request alter that history in such a way that could (and did in one case) trigger an incorrect timeout.

No Moves == No Timeout

Thanks to stonemender for reporting this one... Games without any moves were not timing out. This, again, was caused by the change to looking at the game's history for the last move timestamp.

Plenty of Timeouts on the Way

With this release, I feel much better about the timeout code. So, for the first time in a while, I'll be running the cron job that times out games tonight. This cron job has been disabled for quite a while, due to outstanding bugs. While disabled games would still timeout, just under fewer circumstances. For example, reviewing a game or a tourney's standings would timeout games as appropriate. But, if a player were to ignore a game it could remain in limbo indefinitely.

Most of the games that are due to timeout are games between anonymous players and bots, so I expect the bots to have much higher ratings tomorrow.

Doubled Tourney Games

Now a topic unrelated to timing. We've had two tourneys now that started twice, resulting in a doubling up of tourney games. Both times, I fixed the tourneys manually. After the first time I thought I'd fixed the bug. After this most recent occurrence, it's clear I didn't. : ((

This time I've completely disabled a large part of the code that starts tourneys. Before this release, a tourney would start immediately when it reached capacity (that is, the last player clicked join!. Tourneys that didn't reach capacity would be started at the top of the hour after the scheduled start time by a cron job.

The tourneys that started twice were both at capacity, so I've disabled that code. Now tourneys will only be started by cron job, which should eliminate the race condition that caused the bug.

I hope to have a better fix in the future.

Thanks!

Everyone's been very patient as I've worked through these (and other) bugs -- I appreciate it! Thanks!
Comments

rozencrantz says,

So the timeout code went online right when I lost internet access for a week. Good timing!

Luckily, I'm not attached to statistics, so all it really means is I don't get to play a few games.

eki says,

Sorry to hear that, rozencrantz. : ((

I hate to see games timeout... particularly, for established players, since they almost always intend to finish the games, but, as in your case, can't get online or to a computer for some reason.

I'll work on making vacation days more accessible (available on a less expensive membership, or maybe available to purchase independent of a membership). Hopefully, then established players will buy some vacation days to cover unexpected internet outages...

Or, perhaps, I should give some small number of vacation days to all players after they've been active on the site for a certain period of time (or number of games), and additional days could be purchased?

rozencrantz says,

I would like to see them for sale in smaller amounts, just 1 or 2 can sometimes make the difference.


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