More detail about the problems tonight

[jimmosk]

I just wanted to describe more of what we observed at the Swarthmore roundsing tonight. (I never got an actual crash message, so I don't have any error info to paste here.)

Six of us got on at 7pm and were chatting for 15 minutes or so, with only a couple minor glitches like someone's video not initially showing up. But when we tried to actually sing, very weird things started happening. People were switched to different buckets repeatedly, when they hadn't tried to move using the Join buttons. And when they did click Join, they were usually sent into the wrong bucket -- and sometimes others got moved as well. When I finally clicked 'Start SInging', nothing happened except the button changed to 'Stop Singing'. But no actual sound-recording-and-delayed-playback happened. It was as if I hadn't clicked it at all.
Each of us regularly got the message that our lag had become too high and we wouldn't be able to participate; when we clicked 'Try again' we were okay for between 5 seconds and 5 minutes.
Eventually we we completely unable to access the site - those of us who tried reloading just got 'could not load site' timeout errors. That's when Jed texted you.

15 minutes later the site was back, and everything worked fine! The now-five of us had about 40 minutes of perfectly normal roundsinging (yay!), and then the Start Singing button stopped working and the site became inaccessible again. 15 minutes after that, the two of us who were still willing to continue were able to get back on again, and had an almost glitch-free hour of singing.

I hope there isn't something that's not scaling well, so that the server could handle 2 people but not 5 or 6. Or rather, if that's what's going on I hope it can be fixed. Or maybe the server was just having a bad night? Either way, I'd love to hear from you when you think the server is in good shape for me to hold another sing!

[jeffkaufman]

I think what I'd like to try next time is rebooting the server right before; give me a heads up when you schedule the next one and I will?

[jimmosk]

Will do!

[jimmosk]

We just had a two-hour roundsing that went great! There were a couple of small things -- The first time I led a song, and again the first time I did so after one of the three times I recalibrated, I was unable to hear any bucket but my own (though others say they heard everyone); and a couple of times Jed and Joel each had the sound drop out for a second in the middle of singing, and when they came back they were now out of phase with everyone else -- but they were transient, not repeated, events. So if you did indeed reboot the server before we showed up... it worked!

I do have one request, which if you'd prefer I can open a separate ticket for: the Recordings in that tab all include the metronome, and quite loudly. Since we often end up drifting from the metronome (and turn its volume level down so it doesn't distract us), the resulting recordings sound really bad. Is there really any need to the metronome to be included in the recording?

Thanks again for your help; it was an excellent roundsing!