[brenningen]

Hi,

I’m asking why since this has been a reported problem for years. The slightest hickup and you’re out. On iOS the client won’t even let you know you’re kicket out anymore.

I can’t see any reason why BBO can’t automatically reconnect the session - any other sites with the same requirements does. And thus the solution should be easy to obtain and implement.

Please fix.

B.r.

Eivind B

[TylerE]

Because the software is crap, and they obviously don't care. They're just milking the cow until it dies (when the ACBL contract expires in a few years)

[Kc 11]

I agree. I play about an hour/day, mainly express rewards bbo 4 board tourney. It seems that 1 out of every 3 tourneys I'm disconnected for no reason, and there's definitely no issues with my internet. I've written bbo about this with no fix to date.

Keith Chasin. (kc11)

[smerriman]

Kc 11, on 2023-April-06, 05:16, said:

It seems that 1 out of every 3 tourneys I'm disconnected for no reason, and there's definitely no issues with my internet.

I don't recall the last time I was disconnected from BBO; it was probably several years ago, and I don't have the highest quality internet. So what you are experiencing definitely doesn't affect everyone and so can't be solely an issue on BBO's side.

The exception is playing robot challenges / tournaments, which can give an error if you are playing at exactly the time of day that all the daylongs finish and are being calculated (?). No disconnection, just some table errors.

Edit - I'm running a poll on BW. Check back soon for the results..

[pescetom]

smerriman, on 2023-April-06, 13:17, said:

I don't recall the last time I was disconnected from BBO; it was probably several years ago, and I don't have the highest quality internet. So what you are experiencing definitely doesn't affect everyone and so can't be solely an issue on BBO's side.

I remember it, although it was 2 years ago.
But then it was frequent and it was because I was playing from a zone of my house with poor (but not impossible) wifi connection.
Many other players in my club had the same problem for the same reason.
Now I am wired to the router, zero problems.

smerriman, on 2023-April-06, 13:17, said:

Edit - I'm running a poll on BW. Check back soon for the results..

If you are in time, I think you would do well to qualify the poll better.

Quote

Just talking about BBO connection issues (so if you are on a known shaky connection, where you expect disconnections in general, please abstain).

I will abstain as requested, but I am not convinced there is no problem.
My issues WERE on a known shaky connection, but other sites with more demanding connection requirements could handle it without disconnecting.
I didn't expect or experience disconnections in general and I can't imagine why a game like BBO should have to disconnect for a momentary wifi glitch or a lost IP packet.

P.S. the problems were on Android with wifi and the no problems on Windows with wire, I have no experience with Apple products either way and no idea if there are specific issues there.

[smerriman]

pescetom, on 2023-April-06, 14:26, said:

I will abstain as requested
..
My issues WERE on a known shaky connection [but] I didn't expect or experience disconnections in general

I mentioned abstaining if you expected disconnections, so you don't qualify to abstain

Agree it could be more robust to packet loss but at this point I'm more just narrowing it down to the fact people experiencing issues must be experiencing packet loss first (and that this is rare), rather than having a perfect connection as others claim.

Of course, they probably think they have a perfect connection because the issues don't affect other websites. But the poll should include them as non-abstainers.

[pescetom]

smerriman, on 2023-April-06, 15:10, said:

I mentioned abstaining if you expected disconnections, so you don't qualify to abstain

Agree it could be more robust to packet loss but at this point I'm more just narrowing it down to the fact people experiencing issues must be experiencing packet loss first (and that this is rare), rather than having a perfect connection as others claim.

Of course, they probably think they have a perfect connection because the issues don't affect other websites. But the poll should include them as non-abstainers.

Ok, but I still think you risk offering BBO a public alibi they do not deserve
It is trivial for an application like BBO to function despite occasional packet loss.
Which is particularly disturbing as it used to do so effectively when connections had a fraction of their current speed and reliability.
My gut feeling is that someone removed the timeout/retry logic or tried to update it and got it wrong.
In any case, at very least it should advise the user after a reasonable time that the network is dead or broken, rather than looking like it is waiting for someone to play (or next game, or some other normal event beyond the user's control), or disconnecting immediately and down to login level.

[smerriman]

The results seem pretty clear and line up with previous threads on the topic.

- 2/3 of people experience no problems at all, with another 15% rare disconnections
- 10% experience occasional disconnections
- 9% experience regular disconnections

with the usual reports that:

a) temporarily switching to a different app results in a disconnection
b) any slight interruption to the connection / loss of a data packet results in a disconnection

a) is a result of b) since e.g. iOS in particular places heavy restrictions on background apps.

And b) seems to come down to the fact that BBO constantly pings the client and a single lack of acknowledgement results in a disconnection, which is a very poor system.

So the conclusion is that people like Kc 11 above most likely *do* have some form of issue with their connection, which may be somewhat resolvable locally, but BBO should have a better system in place regardless, since such connection issues don't affect any other areas of internet browsing.

[smerriman]

Also, 1 in 3 reporting some form of disconnect is a lot higher than I thought (though of course there will be some bias that people experiencing disconnections may be more likely to click the thread - but not excessively so). And more than BBO have probably made out to be the case in the past. Definitely no 'alibi' here

[pescetom]

smerriman, on 2023-April-08, 14:46, said:

The results seem pretty clear and line up with previous threads on the topic.

- 2/3 of people experience no problems at all, with another 15% rare disconnections
- 10% experience occasional disconnections
- 9% experience regular disconnections

with the usual reports that:

a) temporarily switching to a different app results in a disconnection
b) any slight interruption to the connection / loss of a data packet results in a disconnection

a) is a result of b) since e.g. iOS in particular places heavy restrictions on background apps.

And b) seems to come down to the fact that BBO constantly pings the client and a single lack of acknowledgement results in a disconnection, which is a very poor system.

So the conclusion is that people like Kc 11 above most likely *do* have some form of issue with their connection, which may be somewhat resolvable locally, but BBO should have a better system in place regardless, since such connection issues don't affect any other areas of internet browsing.

The fact that a single lack of acknowledgement at IP level seems to result in a disconnection is a travesty of network transport protocol and inferior to what used to happen on much slower and less reliable connections.

But it's also an indication of poor programming that the Android app will drop out to login level as soon as the network disappears, however temporary it may be or however simple for the user to restore (open the door, move closer to the repeater, switch to mobile data or whatever). Other applications will wait a while and then advise that the network looks dead and ask the user what to do (retry/quit), without throwing them out of the current session/context.

Two years ago many of my club encountered and I documented here a third and opposite problem, that with a flaky wifi the game would sometimes hang with the client unaware that it no longer saw the server (despite barmar's assertion that there was a keep-alive protocol involving both sides). I haven't played much on Android since and have no idea if that was quietly fixed.

[barmar]

pescetom, on 2023-April-08, 15:33, said:

The fact that a single lack of acknowledgement at IP level seems to result in a disconnection is a travesty of network transport protocol and inferior to what used to happen on much slower and less reliable connections.

That shouldn't happen. BBO uses TCP, which has automatic retransmissions, so occasional packet loss should not be noticed by the application.

The client sends a heartbeat message to BBO every few seconds. The server will disconnect the client if it doesn't hear from it for something like 15 seconds. This would require more than just an occasional dropped packet.

Today I was playing robot duplicates while eating lunch, and also listening to Internet radio, using a public hotspot on my tablet. 2 or 3 times during the session, everything stopped for about a minute. The radio paused, and the robots stopped responding. But when the Internet problem cleared up, both the radio and bridge resumed.

[pescetom]

barmar, on 2023-April-14, 15:07, said:

That shouldn't happen. BBO uses TCP

Are you certain of this? It does not match what I have seen, maybe Android/Samsung TCP is faulty. There are significant network issues with my elderly Galaxy A6+ phone (Snapdragon 450), but my tablet is top of the range.

barmar, on 2023-April-14, 15:07, said:

The client sends a heartbeat message to BBO every few seconds. The server will disconnect the client if it doesn't hear from it for something like 15 seconds. This would require more than just an occasional dropped packet.

The Android client will disconnect the user right down to login within milliseconds if the network disappears.

When the device thinks the network is still working but in reality it is not (moving slightly out of wifi effective range), at least a couple of years ago the Android client often had no idea that it could no longer see the server. And the server seemed convinced that I was connected but inactive. It might have been right on the threshold of 15 seconds, but I doubt it. Since then I have been wired. If it is useful, I can experiment.

[barmar]

pescetom, on 2023-April-15, 15:51, said:

The Android client will disconnect the user right down to login within milliseconds if the network disappears

That's a different issue. When the WiFi connection goes down, you get a different IP when it reconnects. We don't automatically recover from this change, because the server's connection information is all tied to the IP address. Also, some operating systems tear down all network connections when the interface goes down.

We'd need to redesign our connection handling significantly to reconnect automatically when this happens. Applications that were designed from the beginning to work with mobile devices often do this, since WiFi disconnection is common, but our server was designed 20 years ago without this expectation.

TCP handles transient packet loss automatically. But network disconnections are harder to deal with.

[TylerE]

The same issue applies on iOS.