4 ms·

I play this game semi-often and as the popularity has risen, the performance of the game has gone down hill. Interestingly enough almost all the issues occur w

I play this game semi-often and as the popularity has risen, the performance of the game has gone down hill. Interestingly enough almost all the issues occur when starting the game - after the first question the game runs (somewhat) smoothly, even though there may be 400k+ viewers. I wonder what technical hurdles their hitting that causes the app to lag at the start (an issue the commonly delays the game by 30-60 minutes).

rjeli 9y ago
Probably because most people leave as soon as they lose?
- nemothekid 9y ago
  I thought so too, but from playing the game there could be as many as 300k+ participants by the 3rd question, and on Sunday games that number could be as high as 500k, nearing their all time high, and tens of thousands still watch all the way (for some reason). The issues, as I have noticed them, have always been around getting started. Today I noticed an issue where my sister was playing HQ, but didn't get any questions and everyone in her chat was complaining about the game being broken but not in mine. I then noticed her viewer count said 22k while mine said 300k - somehow she was in the wrong session (so maybe there's a CDN issue)?
  - jfaat 9y ago
    or (gasp!) the viewer count is a complete bullshit number
    - trevyn 9y ago
      I'm curious, would this be legal?
      - gdilla 9y ago
        sure if they disclosed it and said, live view count is just an estimation or for entertainment purposes only.
    - geoffpado 9y ago
      The host often mentions the number of viewers, so it'd be weird for them to be having multiple different numbers. The numbers might not be real, but this would imply they should at least be consistent.
    - nemothekid 9y ago
      Why lie about the viewer count though at this stage? Thats an incredibly cynical view. In good fun, if someone asked how I would tackle HQ's scale problem my first response wouldn't be "the viewer count is bullshit." Besides you can also see the amount of people who responded to each question up until the end. If you really wanted to catch the act you could go through the process of verifying the last couple winners yourself. In any case thats besides point, weather the view count is 100k or 600k, starting the game has problems. Once the game has started, the participant count, weather 300k or 50k is smooth. I think chis is right, their question/answer logic has trouble delivering the questions to all their users as you can even notice the host has trouble loading the questions so he can read them out.
chis 9y ago
My theory is that they lag when logging people in and sending the questions over. Seems like streaming video is a solved problem, but they’re struggling to scale their custom logic governing the trivia.
- a13n 9y ago
  They've only had a few weeks to scale up from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand concurrent websocket connections. It's weird that it works great sometimes, and other times it doesn't. I'd love to read their engineering blog!
- azinman2 9y ago
  In my experience it's the video that's the problem.
- mm9000 9y ago
  For me, the questions and answers are always served but the video rarely shows. Which honestly works for me because I find the host pretty annoying.
- whafro 9y ago
  Streaming video in the conventional case may be a solved problem, but HQ has the additional (and seemingly unique to me) challenge of needing the streams to be nearly perfectly in sync. It's less like a bunch of people streaming HBO and more like half a million folks viewing a live webinar or something. I can imagine WebEx, a far more established and mature product, might cough a bit too.
kondro 9y ago
Maybe just an authentication-based issue. Things like Bcryot are designed to be resource-intensive on purpose, with default difficulties usually causing hash rates of 10-20 per second per core.

rjeli 9y ago

Probably because most people leave as soon as they lose?

nemothekid 9y ago
I thought so too, but from playing the game there could be as many as 300k+ participants by the 3rd question, and on Sunday games that number could be as high as 500k, nearing their all time high, and tens of thousands still watch all the way (for some reason). The issues, as I have noticed them, have always been around getting started. Today I noticed an issue where my sister was playing HQ, but didn't get any questions and everyone in her chat was complaining about the game being broken but not in mine. I then noticed her viewer count said 22k while mine said 300k - somehow she was in the wrong session (so maybe there's a CDN issue)?
- jfaat 9y ago
  or (gasp!) the viewer count is a complete bullshit number
  - trevyn 9y ago
    I'm curious, would this be legal?
    - gdilla 9y ago
      sure if they disclosed it and said, live view count is just an estimation or for entertainment purposes only.
  - geoffpado 9y ago
    The host often mentions the number of viewers, so it'd be weird for them to be having multiple different numbers. The numbers might not be real, but this would imply they should at least be consistent.
  - nemothekid 9y ago
    Why lie about the viewer count though at this stage? Thats an incredibly cynical view. In good fun, if someone asked how I would tackle HQ's scale problem my first response wouldn't be "the viewer count is bullshit." Besides you can also see the amount of people who responded to each question up until the end. If you really wanted to catch the act you could go through the process of verifying the last couple winners yourself. In any case thats besides point, weather the view count is 100k or 600k, starting the game has problems. Once the game has started, the participant count, weather 300k or 50k is smooth. I think chis is right, their question/answer logic has trouble delivering the questions to all their users as you can even notice the host has trouble loading the questions so he can read them out.

chis 9y ago

My theory is that they lag when logging people in and sending the questions over. Seems like streaming video is a solved problem, but they’re struggling to scale their custom logic governing the trivia.

a13n 9y ago
They've only had a few weeks to scale up from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand concurrent websocket connections. It's weird that it works great sometimes, and other times it doesn't. I'd love to read their engineering blog!
azinman2 9y ago
In my experience it's the video that's the problem.
mm9000 9y ago
For me, the questions and answers are always served but the video rarely shows. Which honestly works for me because I find the host pretty annoying.
whafro 9y ago
Streaming video in the conventional case may be a solved problem, but HQ has the additional (and seemingly unique to me) challenge of needing the streams to be nearly perfectly in sync. It's less like a bunch of people streaming HBO and more like half a million folks viewing a live webinar or something. I can imagine WebEx, a far more established and mature product, might cough a bit too.

kondro 9y ago

Maybe just an authentication-based issue. Things like Bcryot are designed to be resource-intensive on purpose, with default difficulties usually causing hash rates of 10-20 per second per core.