BrainKing Performance Tuning

I have discovered a really nice and useful web tool today. It is called Host Tracker and its purpose is to make independent and as objective as possible speed tests of a selected web site.

Speaking of a "discovery", it doesn't mean that it is a brand new service, I just wasn't aware of it before. Actually, Host Tracker seems to be active since 2004.

Unlike the Speed Test tool I was writing about before, Host Tracker does not measure your local line speed while accessing a target web site, but takes advantage of many (currently 62) servers located at different countries and displays particular response times. This is what I have measured a minute ago:

http://host-tracker.com/check_res_ajx/972678-0/share/

I think that the most important advantage of Host Tracker is that if you have temporary speed problems with BrainKing game site, you can easily check whether it is a global issue (all 62 servers display similar bad results) or just a local one (the majority of results are less than 1 second). Clicking on the following icon should do the trick:

I have discovered a great tool to measure a network speed between your computer and our servers. It is very easy to use and can provide interesting results, useful for any further investigation.



If you want to, please click the Begin Test button and when the test is done, please add a comment with the download and upload values, along with your location. It would be great if these tests are performed more times during this weekend and Monday.

Thanks and have fun.

I have created a new article category, called "BrainKing Performance Tuning". Actually, it is not about the site performance, which is very good, as the tests prove many times. More precisely, it is about BrainKing connectivity tuning.

I have made another experiment today. Using the functionality of public proxy servers, I have routed my Firefox connection through 5 different proxy servers (located in Germany, France, United Kingdom, USA and Canada), one by one, and tested the average loading time of selected BrainKing pages. In order to compare results with my local access, I have opened the same BrainKing at the next Firefox tab and performed the same clicks.

The results are interesting, more or less. The average page loading time is:

• The same as the local one - 1-2 seconds (Germany and France)
• 3-4 seconds (United Kingdom)
• 5-6 seconds (USA and Canada)

One could say that the more remote the proxy server is, the longer delay has been detected. It is logical - the data must pass through more network nodes and routers, and every single one can cause a short delay. That's how the internet works and due to the same reason, PayPal (an example) is much slower for me than local sites.

I would like to make one thing fully clear - this is not a definitive conclusion of any kind, I have just made some tests to confirm my theories. However, if I take the measured times as some kind of reference, it is not a bad result at all, considering the fact that BrainKing pages had to be sent there and back (e.g. from BrainKing server to the American proxy and then back to my computer), so if we divide the time by two, we get an average loading time of 4 seconds. Furthermore, proxy servers can be used by hundreds or thousands of other people simultaneously, so some kind of overload (ergo, more delay) has been expected as well. Videlicet: It is slower than my local NIX connection but still far from being called "dead slow".

Important: It is not recommended to use any public proxy servers to access sites where any kind of personal information must be submitted (including user names and passwords) - thus it is not recommended to use them to access BrainKing. And, of course, I didn't make these checks with Fencer account. For security reasons, a normal test account has been used instead.

However, there is something ... (to be continued)

Yes, it is here again, I am posting again what was already posted many times. It seems that this topic is a "fixed star" and never goes off. But I hate to copy and paste only, so there is some more information - whether it is popular or not is up to everyone to decide.

Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in time, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space, so it is realized that BrainKing's speed is not an absolute but depended on the observer's location in the web.

I have made an experiment and check BrainKing accounts of all users who have been complaining about BrainKing being too slow for them during the recent month, one by one. The checking procedure has consisted of the following steps:

• Logging in and displaying the most important BrainKing pages - Main Page (game list), a discussion board page, a game page, a tournament page (with section tables), a fellowship page, a profile page, etc.
• Doing it again with all three styles (castle, simple and no fonts), all major web browsers (the latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera), and three different internet connections (cable, ADSL and mobile GPRS).

Outcome:

• Average page generation time is 0.3 seconds.
• Average page loading time is 1-2 seconds (except GPRS, where the loading time increases to 5-10 seconds, but GPRS is a very slow connection type anyway).
• No performance issues have been observed during a 30 minutes long continuous test.

I have also checked accounts of a few users who have more than 2000 started games at this moment, just to make sure that this number has no negative impact on the performance. The results have been almost the same, except the page generation time which have increased to 1.5 seconds (logically, it takes a little more time to create a page with a table containing 2000 rows).

These tests were performed several times in different hours to check the site behavior in different time zones.

Conclusion: Based on all possible tests we are capable of to do, BrainKing has no known performance issues, regarding the server side. The total duration of all tests also forecloses the local network line bottleneck as a possible cause of slow page loading.

Got it? I hope it is clear enough even for rattlebrains and blog trolls.

Further explanation of possible causes of a slowness:

• BrainKing generates pages too slowly - negative. This is a server-side only feature and is not affected by the target user location. The mentioned tests have proved that the average page generation time is very fast.
• BrainKing works slowly only for certain users - negative. The tests have been done for more than 15 different accounts of different levels, different number of started games and different amount of total displayed information. No anomalies have been detected.
• BrainKing transfers generated pages too slowly - negative. Since the tests have been done using 3 different connections and one of them works through a foreign proxy server (located in Europe but not in our country), it is proved that at least the speed of local lines is sufficient. And it is logical that we cannot affect the performance of other lines which are not controlled by us. That's the nature of the web.
• BrainKing is slow and all other sites are fast - negative. Yes, that's one of the most popular complaints. And one of the most annoying myths too. A term "brainwashed" suggests itself first of all, but I think it's better to say that people are not used to think globally. I could say with the same "success" that PayPal is the slowest money processing site in the world and all other sites of this kind are operating at a light speed, and it would be just the same nonsense.

For any further information, please read About the complexity (part 1) (and I recommend to read the section containing Important! Do not use BrainKing public discussion boards for this purpose. in particular - meaningful comments can be posted here instead), Bug me not! or BrainKing site performance again.

And yes, this article is meant to be provoking. (to be continued - most likely)

I like to get an overview of our site statistics, so I have recently inspected January 2008 numbers, generated by BrainKing site. Generally said, the results are as we have expected, the numbers of unique visitors and page views are successfully growing, etc. There is another number which is worth noticing - 33.6% BrainKing site visitors are still using Internet Explorer 6.0. It is alarming.

Last year I wrote a short article about Internet Explorer flaws and why we do no recommend to use it. It is understandable that there are situations where people have no other choice (e.g. their employer does not allow to install any alternative browsers to company computers), but there is no point to keep the old, obsolete, terrible and dangerous 6.0 version.

If you are using Internet Explorer now, please do not click here. Most likely, your browser will crash or, if you are lucky, freeze for a long time.

Still not convinced? How about this?

Some of the known vulnerabilities and security risks can be fixed by applying a patch but since we know that many people do not update their operating system on a regular basis, it cannot be taken as an excuse. It is really sad how many people want to stay at
the weird and wonderful world of Internet Explorer.

And now something different - for a long time, I have been wondering why the User agent (a short text string containing your web browser name, version, operating system etc.) which is detected by BrainKing on some users' accounts contains mysterious words FunWebProducts. Now I know that and it is really not funny, especially where there are people (not all of them, of course) who complain about BrainKing speed and swear that their computer is not infected by any viruses, spyware or adware, but the user agent proves the opposite. And it is not about 1 or 2 persons - the database says that more than 1000 BrainKing users have their computers infected with this bad product. And no matter whether the particular unwanted product is harmful or not, it always means a risk of a speed issue.

First of all, I would like to apologize to technically educated people who will probably find this article boring because it contains nothing new, regarding the common behavior of computers, networks and the web. Hints and suggestions, which are presented here, are mostly targeted to BrainKing users who are occasionally confused why the site is slower than usual and do not know what to do with it.

Very well. Let me go through all known problems and their solutions:

• My connection to BrainKing is slow and my friend says that it is fast for him. Yes, this complaint belongs to the frequent ones and although it is not very descriptive, there are always something to say. In the first place, we already summarized some information in the past and since all of those tips are still valid, I don't want to post them again - simply click this link and read on. However, it never hurts to recapitulate some fundamental knowledge to base the rest on. A web application of the BrainKing type is a very complex and large-scale system that works on a centralized principle, which means that every user who wants to play games or do any other interaction with other players, must use a client software (which is, in this case, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or any other supported web browser) to connect to the BrainKing server, send requests and get responses. It is a direct opposite to a peer-to-peer application where clients can communicate one another, without routing all information and data through a centralized server (Skype or ICQ are good examples). It also means that no BrainKing user is actually "connected" to the server - when he clicks a link or submit a game move, the browser connects to the server, receives a generated web page and disconnects. Unlike online applications where a client creates a long-standing connection and uses is to communicate with a server continuously, a browser based client discards a connection once it is used and must always create a new one. Ergo, if one BrainKing page is loaded very fast, nothing can guarantee that the next one will keep the same response time.
  
  Solution:
  • If a BrainKing pages partially loads and then the browser seems freezed or doing nothing to display the rest, do not wait passively and click the browser's Reload button. In 99% cases, the page data has been lost somewhere on the way and it is almost always faster to get everything again.
  • If reload does not help, try to click the browser's Stop button (which should immediately stop the page loading process), wait for a couple of second and hit Reload again. It is well known that some web browsers can start to act strange under certain circumstances if web pages are being loaded too frequently for a long time - it can help to give them some time to make a garbage collection, so to say.
  • If stop and reload does not help, restart the whole browser and try to open BrainKing again. An occasional restart is a good thing even for BrainKing itself and many programs work better if they are freshly loaded to the computer's memory.
  • Still does not work? Check your computer for a possible presence of spyware or viruses. This action is recommended to be done on a regular basis anyway, especially on computers which are frequently connected to the internet. Furthermore, check if you are using the latest versions of important applications which are installed at your computer (it includes the operating system which is Microsoft Windows in many cases - check the Windows Update service at least once a week). There is an interesting report which says that only 5% of all tested computers contains up-to-date software and more than 40% computers contain at least 11 out-of-date programs which can cause a security risk. Never underestimate this.
  • Is it still slow? Please read the Network side section of this article and try to apply listed tips. It is likely that the problem has emerged somewhere between your computer and BrainKing server and it always means that neither you nor we can solve it ourselves - a third party must be involved as well. Sad, but true.
  • You can also try to activate a new option called Use the "lightweight" version of BrainKing which can be found at BrainKing's Settings / General page. It can be helpful for people who experience page loading speed problems and mostly want to play games, even if other BrainKing features would be reduced or disabled. The trick is that when this option is on, BrainKing will shorten the length of its most important pages to the least possible minimum, disable all JavaScript features and ignore some values which are real-time calculated.
  • Nothing helps and you are really desperate and hopeless? All right, this is the time to contact us - the e-mail address is info@brainking.com, we understand English and Czech, and the more information you provide (your BrainKing ID or user name, your operating system, browser type, screen size, connection speed - guaranteed by your ISP, name of your ISP - internet service provider, your country etc.), the better is the chance that we find out the problem source which can be really specific only for you, and suggest a specific solution. Once again, please be descriptive and give us as many information as possible. Messages like "it doesn't work, help!" or "all other sites are fast but BrainKing is slow, fix it" are usually sent directly to the trash folder. Important! Do not use BrainKing public discussion boards for this purpose. Such messages are usually buried under other user responses like "it does not happen to me, BrainKing is fast" or "yes, it happens to me too but it was better yesterday" and rarely turn out a positive result.


• BrainKing works fine but I have problems with images - they are loaded very slowly and some of them never show up. Ah, the complexity comes to a focus again. BrainKing images are served by a separate server which is running at i.brainking.com address ("i" stands for "images"), in order to balance the total load and give the BrainKing application more computing power to handle game related requests - calculate game positions, resolve various game situations, search through discussion boards etc. And the possible problem source can be that your browser does not want to handle these images correctly because they come from a different server (not "brainking.com"), especially when you use a localized BrainKing domain (brainking.de, brainking.es, ...).
  
  Solution:
  • Make sure that your local DNS cache is up to date. Sometimes, when a new domain or subdomain is created, there can be a delay between the release and acknowledgement by other DNS servers around the world. If you use Windows, open the command line (Start / Run and type "cmd" <ENTER>) and use the ipconfig /flushdns command.
  • Check if i.brainking.com is not blocked in your browser's list of allowed sites to display images from. By default, it should not be blocked but it cannot hurt to know for sure. If you use Firefox, you can find this list at Tools / Options / Content / Load images automatically / Exceptions panel.
  • Check your operating system firewall settings if it does not block outgoing requests or incoming responses from the i.brainking.com domain.
  • Use CTRL-F5 key combination to reload the web page (which shows missing images) without using the browser's cache.
  • Right-click at the missing image location (it is usually marked as a red x at a white square) and select View Image action from the pop-up menu (it can look a little different in non-Firefox or non-English browsers). If nothing shows up, hit CTRL-F5. If still nothing shows up or an error message appears, it is likely that this image is really missing at BrainKing server - please contact us (info@brainking.com) with as many details as possible (at least include the missing image URL).

Hmmmm, the article is quite long now and I haven't posted even a half of my thoughts. To be continued. Next time, I will describe some of BrainKing myths and their real background.

If you face a situation of the site being slow for you sometimes, please read this article carefully. I will try to describe the possible sources of the problem and suggest a solution for the particular issues.

There are three main categories of the site performance problems - server side, network side and client side. And there is only one which can be influenced by us - yes, the server side, i.e. the BrainKing computers themselves. The other ones are out of our reach and must be resolved individually, with the user's assistance.

Let me summarize that:

• Server side - it was a big problem several years ago, when BrainKing had been running on a very slow database server and was almost permanently overloaded. Furtunatelly, it is not an issue anymore (for more than a year), BrainKing code was optimized many times and the site maintains its optimal performance itself. Moreover, when a speed problem occurs, the site either resolves it with a help of its own watch-and-recover utilities or sends an alert to the administrators who make the proper actions manually.
• Network side - since BrainKing is an international site and the servers are located in Prague, Czech Republic, users from other countries (or even other continents) can occasionally face a situation of pages being loaded slowly or incompletely, which is caused by a network problem "somewhere on the way". The recommended solution is to disconnect from the internet and reconnect after a while to check if the speed is better. If not, contact your ISP and ask if their line abroad is not overloaded.
• Client side - this is the most commom source of the mentioned problems. A computer can be infected by a virus or a spyware, which steals the line bandwidth and makes the connection slower, or does other nasty things and negatively affects the web browser's behaviour. Or the browser is allocating too much memory of the computer resources and the system spends more time to resolve this situation than to react on the user's actions. Etc., and so on. The recommended solution is to apply a reliable antivirus and/or spyware removal software, fix the possible browser problem or try to connect from another computer to see if the problem is really caused by the former one.

I will add more points to this list when I am aware of more related information.