Just out of interest: Don't you have nearly unlimited scalability because of Google App Engine?

I had to give up practice after experiencing lags (flashing green dots, no progress without reloading the page) in intervals of sometimes less than a minute.


[Just another note: Twitter and e-mail reminders apparently haven't worked for a few days: http://twitter.com/#search?q=skritter%20days]

No one else affected?

Today the same issue reappears, although I could use Skritter in the morning.

Yes, GAE is scaling nicely, and we've been making sure that the system can scale.

If others are having this problem, the server might be having some problems. From time to time all GAE applications will slow down, and a not long ago all applications went down for a brief period. The best place to see how the server is and has been doing is here:

http://code.google.com/status/appengine

The other possibility is it could be your path to the server is slow, which is a stronger possibility if you're not in north america. Try these different IP addresses and see if any of them do better:

www.skritter.com/home
7.latest.skrit.appspot.com/home
www.skritter.cn/home

Because of an A/B test we've got setup on the front page, if you go there it will redirect you to skritter.com.

www.skritter.com points to a reverse proxy located in the US we use to separate our IP from other appengine applications, so that if one GAE site gets blocked with the GFW, we don't get blocked too.

7.latest.skrit.appspot.com goes straight to the server.

www.skritter.cn is another reverse proxy, but from inside China. We've heard users in Asia find this route faster, though we're not completely sure if it's an improvement.

Let us know if any of this helps!

Thanks for your informative response.
Yes, I access the website from outside the US (Europe), so I'll try the different IP addresses.

Unfortunately still experiencing the same issue although I could just use Skritter for about 3 minutes on 7.latest.skrit.appspot.com.

http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/2010/03/08#ae-trust-detail-datastore-query-latency

Could this be the reason?

Could be! That's a fair amount of yellow and red. And to use practice, it uses queries. But, it seems to be going plenty fast for me right now...

Oh wait, there's one thing we did recently that might be causing this. Have you switched around your parts studied much recently? It looks like you have a bunch of readings in your queue, but you're not studying readings.

Try this: turn on readings along with writings and tones. Turn off any other lists you're adding from and just clear out your queue. Once that's done, turn off readings again if you want to and see if things go faster.

"Try this: turn on readings along with writings and tones. Turn off any other lists you're adding from and just clear out your queue. Once that's done, turn off readings again if you want to and see if things go faster."

Thanks, that appears to work.
教训: Never ever touch an alpha release.

Yeah, this was a bug caused by a tweak we made to the queue to make it work better when there were parts in there that weren't being studied... but apparently it's causing some problems. I've added a bug fix that should make it work better for now. Thanks for the report!