BrainKing Performance Tuning

I like to get an overview of our site statistics, so I have recently inspected January 2008 numbers, generated by BrainKing site. Generally said, the results are as we have expected, the numbers of unique visitors and page views are successfully growing, etc. There is another number which is worth noticing - 33.6% BrainKing site visitors are still using Internet Explorer 6.0. It is alarming.

Last year I wrote a short article about Internet Explorer flaws and why we do no recommend to use it. It is understandable that there are situations where people have no other choice (e.g. their employer does not allow to install any alternative browsers to company computers), but there is no point to keep the old, obsolete, terrible and dangerous 6.0 version.

If you are using Internet Explorer now, please do not click here. Most likely, your browser will crash or, if you are lucky, freeze for a long time.

Still not convinced? How about this?

Some of the known vulnerabilities and security risks can be fixed by applying a patch but since we know that many people do not update their operating system on a regular basis, it cannot be taken as an excuse. It is really sad how many people want to stay at
the weird and wonderful world of Internet Explorer.

And now something different - for a long time, I have been wondering why the User agent (a short text string containing your web browser name, version, operating system etc.) which is detected by BrainKing on some users' accounts contains mysterious words FunWebProducts. Now I know that and it is really not funny, especially where there are people (not all of them, of course) who complain about BrainKing speed and swear that their computer is not infected by any viruses, spyware or adware, but the user agent proves the opposite. And it is not about 1 or 2 persons - the database says that more than 1000 BrainKing users have their computers infected with this bad product. And no matter whether the particular unwanted product is harmful or not, it always means a risk of a speed issue.

First of all, I would like to apologize to technically educated people who will probably find this article boring because it contains nothing new, regarding the common behavior of computers, networks and the web. Hints and suggestions, which are presented here, are mostly targeted to BrainKing users who are occasionally confused why the site is slower than usual and do not know what to do with it.

Very well. Let me go through all known problems and their solutions:

• My connection to BrainKing is slow and my friend says that it is fast for him. Yes, this complaint belongs to the frequent ones and although it is not very descriptive, there are always something to say. In the first place, we already summarized some information in the past and since all of those tips are still valid, I don't want to post them again - simply click this link and read on. However, it never hurts to recapitulate some fundamental knowledge to base the rest on. A web application of the BrainKing type is a very complex and large-scale system that works on a centralized principle, which means that every user who wants to play games or do any other interaction with other players, must use a client software (which is, in this case, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or any other supported web browser) to connect to the BrainKing server, send requests and get responses. It is a direct opposite to a peer-to-peer application where clients can communicate one another, without routing all information and data through a centralized server (Skype or ICQ are good examples). It also means that no BrainKing user is actually "connected" to the server - when he clicks a link or submit a game move, the browser connects to the server, receives a generated web page and disconnects. Unlike online applications where a client creates a long-standing connection and uses is to communicate with a server continuously, a browser based client discards a connection once it is used and must always create a new one. Ergo, if one BrainKing page is loaded very fast, nothing can guarantee that the next one will keep the same response time.
  
  Solution:
  • If a BrainKing pages partially loads and then the browser seems freezed or doing nothing to display the rest, do not wait passively and click the browser's Reload button. In 99% cases, the page data has been lost somewhere on the way and it is almost always faster to get everything again.
  • If reload does not help, try to click the browser's Stop button (which should immediately stop the page loading process), wait for a couple of second and hit Reload again. It is well known that some web browsers can start to act strange under certain circumstances if web pages are being loaded too frequently for a long time - it can help to give them some time to make a garbage collection, so to say.
  • If stop and reload does not help, restart the whole browser and try to open BrainKing again. An occasional restart is a good thing even for BrainKing itself and many programs work better if they are freshly loaded to the computer's memory.
  • Still does not work? Check your computer for a possible presence of spyware or viruses. This action is recommended to be done on a regular basis anyway, especially on computers which are frequently connected to the internet. Furthermore, check if you are using the latest versions of important applications which are installed at your computer (it includes the operating system which is Microsoft Windows in many cases - check the Windows Update service at least once a week). There is an interesting report which says that only 5% of all tested computers contains up-to-date software and more than 40% computers contain at least 11 out-of-date programs which can cause a security risk. Never underestimate this.
  • Is it still slow? Please read the Network side section of this article and try to apply listed tips. It is likely that the problem has emerged somewhere between your computer and BrainKing server and it always means that neither you nor we can solve it ourselves - a third party must be involved as well. Sad, but true.
  • You can also try to activate a new option called Use the "lightweight" version of BrainKing which can be found at BrainKing's Settings / General page. It can be helpful for people who experience page loading speed problems and mostly want to play games, even if other BrainKing features would be reduced or disabled. The trick is that when this option is on, BrainKing will shorten the length of its most important pages to the least possible minimum, disable all JavaScript features and ignore some values which are real-time calculated.
  • Nothing helps and you are really desperate and hopeless? All right, this is the time to contact us - the e-mail address is info@brainking.com, we understand English and Czech, and the more information you provide (your BrainKing ID or user name, your operating system, browser type, screen size, connection speed - guaranteed by your ISP, name of your ISP - internet service provider, your country etc.), the better is the chance that we find out the problem source which can be really specific only for you, and suggest a specific solution. Once again, please be descriptive and give us as many information as possible. Messages like "it doesn't work, help!" or "all other sites are fast but BrainKing is slow, fix it" are usually sent directly to the trash folder. Important! Do not use BrainKing public discussion boards for this purpose. Such messages are usually buried under other user responses like "it does not happen to me, BrainKing is fast" or "yes, it happens to me too but it was better yesterday" and rarely turn out a positive result.


• BrainKing works fine but I have problems with images - they are loaded very slowly and some of them never show up. Ah, the complexity comes to a focus again. BrainKing images are served by a separate server which is running at i.brainking.com address ("i" stands for "images"), in order to balance the total load and give the BrainKing application more computing power to handle game related requests - calculate game positions, resolve various game situations, search through discussion boards etc. And the possible problem source can be that your browser does not want to handle these images correctly because they come from a different server (not "brainking.com"), especially when you use a localized BrainKing domain (brainking.de, brainking.es, ...).
  
  Solution:
  • Make sure that your local DNS cache is up to date. Sometimes, when a new domain or subdomain is created, there can be a delay between the release and acknowledgement by other DNS servers around the world. If you use Windows, open the command line (Start / Run and type "cmd" <ENTER>) and use the ipconfig /flushdns command.
  • Check if i.brainking.com is not blocked in your browser's list of allowed sites to display images from. By default, it should not be blocked but it cannot hurt to know for sure. If you use Firefox, you can find this list at Tools / Options / Content / Load images automatically / Exceptions panel.
  • Check your operating system firewall settings if it does not block outgoing requests or incoming responses from the i.brainking.com domain.
  • Use CTRL-F5 key combination to reload the web page (which shows missing images) without using the browser's cache.
  • Right-click at the missing image location (it is usually marked as a red x at a white square) and select View Image action from the pop-up menu (it can look a little different in non-Firefox or non-English browsers). If nothing shows up, hit CTRL-F5. If still nothing shows up or an error message appears, it is likely that this image is really missing at BrainKing server - please contact us (info@brainking.com) with as many details as possible (at least include the missing image URL).

Hmmmm, the article is quite long now and I haven't posted even a half of my thoughts. To be continued. Next time, I will describe some of BrainKing myths and their real background.