lichess site crashing very often

people like lichess very much. but it's server is crashing down very often nowadays. please take some serious steps to avoid this in future. many players lost matches and tournaments because of this. some people may go back to chess.com if this continues. thank u lichess.

I don't think scaremongering helps anyone. I'm sure the Lichess guys are working on it. Basically, server crashes are a side effect of adding new features for any product. Once new features become mature, the server gets stable again.

Lichess guys have been busy adding new things which we should all be very happy with eg opening database, crazyhouse, little UX tweaks. I've been playing most days and don't think its been too bad. Certainly very happy with what's been added.

Anyone with experience of software development is used to these kinds of growing pains. The other thing that can make servers unstable is huge exponential growth. Maybe the Wesley So day crashes were partly caused by the spike in growth due to Wesley. Its hard to plan for these kinds of spikes unless you're Amazon with unlimited budget planning for xmas sales.

In general, lichess is probably adding new users very fast - check out google trends on lichess if you're curious. Another reason for some instability.

Lets just bear in mind that Lichess is an open source project and the labour of love of a team of dedicated passionate guys giving us an amazing product for free. Lets give them a bit of support.

Crashes are not taken lightly. This work is harder to notice than when new features arrive, and any issue makes people think nothing is being done about it. However staff is working hard to counter different kinds of problems and attacks, but these are hard to get rid of completely. Weak points needs to be predicted/found and fixed before they blow out of proportion which is very challenging.

Just these days the server infrastructure has been beefed up. If anyone is interested there's a link to the spreadsheet with some info on lichess.org/donate

Attacks??

lol that would be hard.

I'd like to mention that lately lichess has been moving to more beefy hardware, hence the occasional downtime caused by hiccups during the migration. Rest assured this will make the server more robust and go down less often. Whether it's worth the downtime caused lately is up to your judgement.

>spreadsheet with some info on lichess.org/donate

Is my memory failing me or has the monthly figure pretty much doubled compared to only some month ago?
A grand each month - man, that's some serious money.

I'll happily donate again now - keep up the great work!

it's ~ +300$ since March 1st

I don't know what happened

#8 I can't check the revision history in the spreadsheet, but lichess moved to a new server a few days ago (the first in the list), and i think another database replica got added. A server for the opening explorer was also added quite recently.

Also a huge loan of stockfish resources ended, I think 64 threads on amazon that was being donated by Sprayable. So the number might rise some more if we want the analysis continue to be fast.

I'm totally ok with renting new servers to keep the site performance on a high level. But I fear that we are in price regions, that are not maintainable by a single person without donations. So everything depends on the donations, right?