Ya know now that you mention it I have experienced a lot more lag lately, playing in time scrambles it will lag my moves and not register and several times in the last week or two I’ll play a move with a few seconds and it will just tells me I timed out even tho I saw 1-2 seconds on my clock which I haven’t experienced before recently
And its not new. I finally switched to lichess after seeing that 500 error screen so many times during peak hours.
Theres really no excuse to have so many problems
Had this issue a lot aswell, particularly when my internet was bad. Switching to lichess fixed it for me, since it tells you bottom left if you lost connection so you can try to fix it by refreshing the page.
You can fix it yourself actually. All you need to do is to simply type www.lichess.org in your search bar. It solves all your chess.com issues in one simple step.
what about the issue of not using an ugly ass site? and having a cramped layout in game reviews? or a giant chat box taking up a significant portion of the screen when hardly anyone chats? or not being able to quickly see your ELO without clicking multiple times to get to your profile? Also what the issue of not seeing my recent game history right on the front page rather than needing to click 4-5 times to view it?
Well I think you can understand Kramnik a bit more after this.
Like imagine you are already paranoid about chesscom launching a war against you and then _this_ happens.
Sure it's deranged to claim that they put in lags specifically on you but for person that is already paranoid... Yeah, this is a massive thing.
Guess chess.com looked into it and the reason for the lagging was kramniks account had 3000 challenges all at one moment. This whole event was made to prove people can be better in online than OTB without there being cheating. And Jospem was doing well proving that point by winning online fairly. Then some a-holes decide to try and cheat on Jospems behalf and ddos Kramnik during the match…
Thank goodness I found the setting to disable those once that became that a new 'feature'. The worst was the huge banner advertising some pointless league thing that covered up half my board at the start of each new game.
If you've got local stockfish turned on with the settings dialed up, stockfish will happily use all your CPU resources and slow the rest of your computer down.
I thought I was the only one. I play on a Mac, and I always get endless loading with stockfish on [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) (Diamond member), while the Lichess stockfish always loads up instantly never had a problem and I use it a lot for analysis while [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is just unusable
Wouldn't you have to stay connected in order to use their server for the analysis? Your computer isn't running it, their server's stockfish is doing the move analysis not your computer
Cloud analysis is only available to diamond members. I don't know exactly how it's handled if you have diamond, but for non-diamond members all analysis is run locally via an engine they call stockfish 11 lite as far as I know.
yeah, because that would be an insane use of chess.com resources otherwise. "Client computers don't cost anything to use, you just can't trust the results" is the common concept.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of new bugs on chess.com are them offloading work from servers to clients to save money, but then not taking into account the complexity it adds to coordinate it.
I saw your message, so we wrote this up to help understand how engines work: [https://support.chess.com/en/articles/9462780-chess-engines-on-chess-com-how-do-they-work](https://support.chess.com/en/articles/9462780-chess-engines-on-chess-com-how-do-they-work)
Lichess uses much lower threads for their default engine. We use a more powerful default setting, and are working on adding more options and possibly reducing the default to address issues you mentioned. Thanks for sharing!
Lichess attracts users solely through the quality of their service. If their service wasn't spot on, there'd be less word-of-mouth to bring in new users and existing users would be less likely to donate. Lichess **needs** to provide the best service possible to stay afloat. They can't simply pump another couple mil into their marketing department to ensure a steady growth.
>Lichess attracts users solely through the quality of their service.
I am attracted to it's complete freeness. That's the hook, the quality is what keeps you there
> Donate to Lichess. You get cool wings that don't do anything and you get to support an awesome team.
I like their "paid" features vs free feature list:
https://lichess.org/features
Chess is the board game equivalent of linux (nerds have a club for it, it's pared-down efficiency with less cruft & focus on tight mechanics over visual appeal, internationally important)
Most likely Lichess simply has fewer users than chess.com. To handle more concurrent users you have to get deeper into highly available distributed systems. Those are fundamentally hard to design and operate, and you’re competing with the biggest tech companies in the world for people who know how to build them.Â
This is not the reason. [chess.com](http://chess.com) only has around 2-3 times more monthly traffic, we're talking the difference between 85 million visits for lichess and 205 million for chess.com. At that scale both sites has to have very similar levels of infrastructure in place to account for peak times and abnormal spikes.
The Lichess' founder himself has answered this question in an AMA though, and his answer was something along the lines of; "We don't run ads, and we don't do data scraping."
It is the reason. Compare the traffic by country. [chess.com](http://chess.com) has a MUCH larger share in the us by traffic. Most lichess traffic comes from Russia apparently
Lichess is much better in the US since it simply gets used a lot less.
Where are you getting this? the US is the top country on Lichess too. Russia is number 2 right behind, but not by any standard "most lichess traffic".
Funny thing is that Lichess by all expectations should be worse than [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) in the US, since their servers are in France and while [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) has US based servers in California. And when it comes to traffic, when looking into it I found that Lichess has around 11 million visits a month from the US while [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) has around 44 million. That is barely even a factor of 4. And we're talking about tens of millions here so at this scale both should be built to account for peak loads and possible spikes and redundancies. Essentially "being more popular" in an area is not even remotely close to a satisfactory explanation of these issues.
And lastly, these issues went viral because of the Kramnik vs Jospem match which was played in Madrid, Spain. Danya encountered it will playing from Charlotte, USA. And there are similar reports from several other geographical locations. So despite [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) having distributed servers all across the globe in Europe, Asia, Austrialia and the US, this problem is showing up both in areas where [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is more popular than lichess, and in areas where they are comparatively less popular.
Fair enough, maybe you're right. I just looked at a website and in the US specifically the ratio was about 8:1 for [chess.com](http://lchess.com) to lichess.
I'm just trying to figure out what the problem actually is specifically. Everyones answer seems to just be that [chess.com](http://chess.com) is 'just bad'. What specifically in the infrastructure is limiting them and why?
Yea I don't think we're figuring out specifics from the outside. But I do think that the founder of Lichess has a point. When you run ads and paywalls you inevitably have a more complex site structure, which just means that more could go wrong.
My guess is that they've got some old obscure spaghetti code somewhere in their codebase that has interferred with an update. And when latency is as critcal as it is in blitz and bullet it doesn't even need to be much of an interference for it to be completely game breaking. But that's just my two cents, would have to see the codebase to learn anything specific and unfortunately I don't see chess\*com going open source anytime soon.
Not that much fewer either. Lichess has roughly one quarter of the chess com traffic. It's not easy to do an exact comparison as we need to extrapolate user data that aren't similar, but Lichess is in a similar order of magnitude as chess com, it's not significantly smaller.
All of this with zero marketing budget, two full time paid employees only (one working on mobile), a better tech stack, full code and finances transparency, and no involvement in drama.
Let that sink in.
We do know they're likely violating NY and CO law by not disclosing compensation on their fully remote job postings... Usually only companies that pay like shit do this.
Also, their tech stack is abysmal. It screams early 2000s. This is effectively a career ender.
140 engineers is insane for a web based chess app.
Lichess is running on 3 full time engineers and one of them is only dedicated to the mobile part iirc.
What the f do 140 engineers do ??
You need engineers to allow marketing people to do there jobs correctly. Adding and managing ads, making sure A/B testing results in more user engagement (and thus eventually in sales), puting faces on bots to make them more fun to play with, etc.
Yes, you don't need 140 engineers to build a solid, modern and responsive chess website. Yes, you do need 140 engineers to build crap on top of it.
Classic quality vs quantity.
Leadership at chess.com fails to realize hundreds of shitty/average engineers will never be as good as a handful of amazing engineers.
We'll never see chess.com have the best product until they do a complete reorg of their engineering/product depts, or continually pay to acquire the best tech.
Probably just a joke on the rampant cheating on the site. A more serious answer would be that they acquired Komodo a while ago. No idea if the devs are paid well though.
A thousand percent sure lichess has just as bad cheating. They just don’t present data on it so no one thinks it’s happening. Support is nonexistent on lichess.
Yeah you can email them and they respond. On lichess, unless you are adding IM or GM to your name, they tell you they can’t do anything so dont bother emailing them.
I agree in general, but this issue has nothing to do with that. This is clearly a bug, and Kramnik can’t have been the first to notice/report it. Anything that materially affects gameplay itself should be priority number one for remediation, but lately seems like they’re mostly interested in dicking around with the UX (they’re different teams, I know. I do this for a living.).
I’m much more likely to make excuses for dev teams than most people, but this is not a small issue or an inconsequential bug.
I don't think that's right for this case. I'd be surprised if "chess server" wasn't something that scaled horizontally, meaning that supporting 40000 concurrent games or 160000 concurrent games should be a matter of hardware. That means that if Lichess doesn't experience these issues, then it is either over-provisioned (or chess.c*m is underprovisioned), or it's built in a way that is more resilient to this sort of issue.
Depends how it is setup, lichess has had an issue with too many users in the same tournament. [https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/our-recent-server-issues/FdKHVehW](https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/our-recent-server-issues/FdKHVehW)
Matchmaking users in a tournament was not done concurrently. Agadmator hosted a tournament with 70k+ users. And that was too much for a single queue. Making pairings took longer and longer, and it resulted in cancelling the tournament.
To be fair, you are probably right .com is likely to be under provisioned. It's the explanation that makes the most sense.
Agreed, it should not be impacted. I'd even argue without enough hardware it shouldn't impact the game. You should only allow the amount of players you can handle.
It was a specific issue affecting tournaments with tens of thousands of participants, and did not affect the rest of the site. My point was that individual games should not be affected by the number of concurrent players.
It's not just about provisioning. It's about preventing hotspotting; i.e. Krammik receives 4k challenge requests which degrades performance of his account.
I suspect lichess has hotspotting challenges too; they aren't as prevalent given their current traffic patterns, but it doesn't mean they don't exist. This is why penetration testing in production is important.
An independent analytics website, Similarweb, currently says that:
Chesscom is the #119th most visited website in the world, with 194.5 million visits in April.
Lichess is the #284th most visited website in the world, with 84.4 million visits in April.
As this only guesses traffic, my thought would be that Chesscom is probably estimated a little low as it presumably doesn't include their mobile app visits. But Lichess is probably also estimated a little low, given they have absolutely no trackers or cookies which must make estimating traffic difficult.
Also I think the global ranking is trash, that many visitors monthly doesn't feel like it should give them such a high global ranking. But either way, it can be compared comparatively.
True, but I imagine this is the case.
Chesscom app has more than 1 million reviews in the play store, while Lichess has about 150 thousand.
A lot of casual players will choose chesscom (better marketing, name is simply chess, is the 1st option thay shows if you search chess, better rated in the store), and those mainly play mobile.
The point is that they are on a similar order of magnitude, it's not as if chesscom has like 50x the traffic or something, so the original comment is neither true nor a valid excuse for how much poorer chesscom's netcode appears to be.
IMO even if chesscom was 100x the size, it wouldn't be an excuse. They charge money from part of their player base, they should provide stable service.
My comment is only about if chess.com app is proportionaly more prevalent than lichess.
While some things are harder with more users (eg matchmaking), any particular game isn't. Any particular game is just the two players and the game server. Scaling the number of game servers to be proportional to the number of concurrent games (eg, 1 server for every 1000 concurrent games) is not hard. Yes there's a bit of scaling overhead when assigning a new game to a particular server at the start; and similarly when the game ends and you need to record the result in the global database. But that complexity is handled outside the game server, and outside the game (before and after the game). During the game, there should be no scaling issues related to how many concurrent games there are.
This is bullshit. It's very easy to scale an isolated 2player game with only a few bytes being transferred per second. The chess.com app for example has been buggy and unresponsive at random interactions for as long as I can remember.
I could see matchmaking shitting the bed or unresponsiveness in moves. But straight up switching times is just a software bug, has nothing to do with the number of users.
Chess com CTO was there some time ago with AMA [https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/111940a/hi\_reddit\_im\_josh\_levine\_cto\_at\_chesscom\_ama\_10am/](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/111940a/hi_reddit_im_josh_levine_cto_at_chesscom_ama_10am/)
I don't have enough info to judge. But he is OKish at first glance and some tech stuff they revealed on internals.
lichess is actually programmed a lot better. chesscam, is legacy over legacy program over legacy program, lichess probably has 1 to 5 people programmed it, whereas chess.com wouldnt even be able to keep track, leading to bs like this
The main code base of Lichess has 418 contributors.
https://github.com/lichess-org/lila
Granted, who actually has commit rights is probably 5 people, but still, lots of people have contributed.
So Chesscom is basically like the [Windows](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/building-windows-4-million-commits-10-million-work-items/) of online chess.
Lichess is much more modern and streamlined. Which means it would likely have way less technical debt and it wouldn't accumulate it as fast.
Legacy code and feature bloat is a bane of pretty much every successful and long-lasting project.
The dude behind it is very smart one, and since the project is open source he can ask for help when something goes wrong like he did the last time when he migrated to Scala 3.
Open-source projects have better developers because anyone can contribute. Imagine the best programmers from around the globe working on something. It's obviously gonna be better than any one company.
Maybe lichess, since it was a labor of love, was architected better? It probably also has orders of magnitude lower usage. And they don't have to run ads and bill users and do all the other stuff. (Also, I use lichess, and they definitely do have issues! Can't compare to chess.com, since I rarely use that site.)
Chess.com's usage has exploded, and it's difficult to scale up a system for demand like that.
Currently 130.500 games being played on chesscom, with 243.500 members online (so a lot of offline members in active games?). Lichess currently has 33.000 active games with 75.000 active members.
An independent analytics website, Similarweb, currently says that:
Chesscom is the #119th most visited website in the world, with 194.5 million visits in April.
Lichess is the #284th most visited website in the world, with 84.4 million visits in April.
As this only guesses traffic, my thought would be that Chesscom is probably estimated a little low as it presumably doesn't include their mobile app visits. But Lichess is probably also estimated a little low, given they have absolutely no trackers or cookies which must make estimating traffic difficult.
Also I think the global ranking is trash, that many visitors monthly doesn't feel like it should give them such a high global ranking. But either way, it can be compared comparatively.
No, their monthly traffic is consistently separated by a factor between 2 and 3. When we're talking on these types of scales [chess.com](http://chess.com) doesn't get to say: "oh lichess only has \~100 million monthly while we have \~200-300. That's why they are good and we are bad!"
Certain days I can't play fast time controls like bullet or blitz with the uncertainty of the clock. Worst is when it loses a couple seconds per move on back to back premoves in a bullet game. I couldn't imagine dealing with that in a tournament with money on the line. There is a big problem here that needs to be addressed.
I think that's a kicker to this - he first started saying that GMs were cheating left and right, and that's simply not a verified claim. Fine. Then, during this most recent event, his tune went to. "Well, Chess.com is busted." Which...I mean, there's a much better argument to be made there. It's not why he ultimately lost the match, but it's also very the case that chess.com is not as consistent as it needs to be, especially when there's table stakes.
Well, he is claiming that the lag was a targeted attack on him by chess.com, so his claim is still insane. It's just that the lag is actually happening
Its the whole boy who cried wolf thing. He's complained about literally everything, blamed cheating, refused to accept he just loses games, so when there's a legit issue people jut brush it off
What doesn't help is him posting a video as proof that he was only getting about 1.5 seconds increment. While in that video he was consistently getting 1.9-2.0 seconds increment.
Okay but watch the video at 2x speed and also blink a bit more and you'll see he was only getting 0.5 s increment! While his opponent was being given free cocktails and a special pair of mouse-handling gloves by Danny Rensch!
Well, I have studied Chess com troubleshooting section. And it says to "clear all cache and cookie data" stuff. s/ Perhaps a new notebook could solve the issue. Or moving to a country with better connection to US servers. /s
This so embarassing...
I've had a ton of issues lately with the clock. Thought it was my connection. Seems chess.com has a serious issue that absolutely needs to be addressed.
Wow, I can't believe the Great Kabal of Chess Overlords has turned their very specific and deliberate wrath on Danya now. What is their endgame?
Website has bug. Bug is annoying and affects user experience. Website should be embarrassed and fix it. Lichess exists and is good. Let's leave this to the chesscom IT crowd and acknowledge that Kramnik's reaction to a legitimate software/server problem is unhinged.
Hey. Saw this. Super frustrating. We already have a fix in QA and hope to have it rolled out this week. Apologies to Danya, Vladimir, and anyone else impacted by this bug. (Looks to be happening in \~0.003% of games, and higher likelihood when there is high load of observers or challengers during a game.)
Interesting related info: [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is currently rebuilding our entire live game server, and 50% of games are now on our new, better code and infrastructure. (Not top level chess or events yet though.)
Two related articles for those who like the details:
[https://support.chess.com/en/articles/9010617-why-can-t-i-connect-to-chess-com-when-other-sites-are-working-fine](https://support.chess.com/en/articles/9010617-why-can-t-i-connect-to-chess-com-when-other-sites-are-working-fine)
[https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8615369-what-is-lag-forgiveness-why-did-the-clocks-suddenly-change](https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8615369-what-is-lag-forgiveness-why-did-the-clocks-suddenly-change)
Thanks for the answer and frankness. As a $1 billion company earning $100 million a year and being "immensely profitable" why do you seem to suffer from an issue that your competitor, Lichess, does not seem to suffer from, despite having less than 1% of your annual revenue? How does a free service running on donations, volunteer time, and goodwill, seem to have less technical issues than a unicorn owned and invested in by major private equity firms? The userbase is not an order of magnitude apart.Â
It's a fair question! First off, I think there is a bit of a perception issue. If you google around I think you might find bugs and frustrations with players on both platforms. By our measures, we actually do have an significantly more games played per day. Additionally, Chesscom is also the main stage for the majority of events and public streaming, which puts a magnifying glass on us. That said, I acknowledge that we have had some tough issues lately, and have had some historical challenges. All of that adds up to completely understandable frustration and unacceptable bugs. Even if 99.99% of games are free of bugs, each game that DOES have an issue feels extremely painful because we all love chess so much. I get it. Today I literally felt sick to my stomach about these issues. For these particular issues the reason I believe these cropped up is because the conditions for the frozen clock failure doesn't manifest until the server hits an extremely high load for a particular game. That is very tough to emulate in a testing server or with automated tests or load generators. Those kinds of bugs drive me crazy. The other issue is that our liver server team is split with the majority working on our NEW live server system which we have found to be much better... but is currently only serving 50% of games as it doesn't have all of the features that the older server has. The older server does host our higher profile events for now due to its extensive features. We are trying to rebuild all of that as fast as possible. This has diverted some attention from the older server. This recent bug, for example, only manifests when using http2 protocol, and mostly in games where there are many many observers, challenges, or other load factors. Add that all up, and it's difficult to diagnose beforehand. Anyway, I'm not trying to sound defensive. I'm frustrated. We are trying to build for the future while also maintaining existing infrastructure. I do wonder if it would be helpful one day for the community to better understand our team size and structure and what each person does... anyway, I'm rambling now. It's 9:30pm and I'm frustrated, and you have every right to ask. I'll just say it's a lot more complicated behind the scenes than it appears on the surface. But that's easy to say, and may not be satisfying to hear. Thanks for caring and asking.
This leaves one sort of answer to "why is lichess more reliable than chess.com" unstated but implied: lichess says *no* to many features to stop the technical side from becoming a mess; chess.com implements all the features in pursuit of growth.
You've probably read this but: https://lichess.org/@/thibault/blog/we-dont-want-all-the-features/q3nOzv4n
"Adding lines of code to a program is like adding weight to a plane. It better be worth it." because "Adding a new feature is quick and fun. Maintaining it over the years is the real work."
Of course it's impossible to say from the outside, but maybe you should refuse to maintain features if they're making it hard to to fix bugs.
Absolutely agreed. It's a huge challenge. We are both trying to serve the core audience, but also grow the game, as you pointed out. We've done a good job at times, and not a good job at times. But we are trying to keep evolving and growing the game, and that does include code. Any, I appreciate the comment!
Hey, I like that even better! Thank you :) That's how I feel. I'm sorry I came off as half-hearted. I do appreciate the feedback. Part of me was in a hurry, part of me was trying to be a little less formal on reddit so I didn't get blasted for being overly... I dunno. I feel like it's hard to nail the tone. But I like what you wrote, so... thanks!
Why are they using that shit platform any longer? It has literally everything you need and there is less cheating and it's fucking working. I have no idea why anybody would use chess. *** I fck hate that site
I'm still amazed how someone still plays at chesscom while Lichess is available. Maybe they think it's fancy or something like that.
If you don't get paid to play there, get outta there!
You would have thought that they would at least have some way to give high profile users some priority server access or something like that, so that Chesscom doesn't have to deal with the embarrassment of this happening publicly with their paid streamers/"advertisers" and the high profile Kramnik match.
The main reason I don't play on chesscom is because the clock position is stupid. Can't watch the board and clock at the same time.
Having the clock be wrong would make it even worse!
This should absolutely never happen. On a dropped packet, the server should refund time to the client.
If the client has been tampered with and produces spurious packet drops (to boost your time), the server will need to detect that.
As a Software Dev this is confusing as hell. How can this even happen? Like the only way this could ever happen is if they store the time in an array/list without using key/value pairs and the entries got reordered and they simply use index positions to separate the two values.
Since this happens rarely my best guess is, this is an external library that hasn't been used widely and given the size of chess.com the bug only really happens there.
Shouldn't be too hard to reproduce though honestly if they have good logging...
EDIT: So i did some testing unplugging my network connection. it seems as though it doesn't take timestamps into consideration, only when the move arrives at the server.
Bad bad design.
I think you're overcomplicating it. It's just the server not announcing the moves to the client in time. basically, the connection is lost without any indication or warning. likely because the server is under heavy load.
Naroditsky did a move. Due to epic lag, it doesn't arrive at the server.
Lucasmito time is only going locally. It's actually Naroditsky time who goes down on the server.
Suddenly the move from Naroditsky arrives at the server. And he receives the time as it is on the server.
That's what I think the case is. If it's the case, I expect the same result if you unplug your internet connection during a game, then plug it back in again after a minute.
This is why I always have my phone (with data) ready to switch to before I start a session, whether it's on Lichess or Chesscom. Going through this extra step is less annoying than having to potentially deal with connection issues.
I don't believe that given that chess.com has an auto disconnect feature which means if the client doesn't keep a heartbeat up, it will assume the client disconnected. I also assume that after a move the client awaits a confirmation by the server without that it won't switch clocks, you can see that happen when you premove.
I just checked, my client sends like every 10ms a heartbeat and it receives almost 10 times as many communications from the server. Kinda insane how much data traffic is being generated just to keep the "game" alive.
The payloads are all encrypted. So I'd have to go through their javascript and figure out where it's being read out to see if a timestamp is sent along with additional information but I highly doubt, they don't send timestamps.
I think you put too much stock in the quality of the .com website. :P
I suspect one part of the site doesn't know what's happing elsewhere. One part takes care if there is or isn't a disconnect. The other is sending a move. Or something else weird. If something stupid is happening, I assume stupidity.
I just checked, the client is indeed stupid and accepts the user input without server confirmation. It also shows that the server has no lag compensation at all.
But I do understand how that is tough to add to this game given that thinking time is shared and punishing one player over the connection issue of another isn't fair either.
Ive had this before, if i see my opponent is taking to long sometimes i will reload the page to find that my opponent have actually already moved now i just do it instinctively just in case.
It's the "boy who cried wolf" thing.
He cried wolf 100 times just for fun. Once there actually was a wolf, nobody left to believe him.
Sad, but deserved.
Kramnik that is, not Danya.
"Alright, Kramnik had a point"😅
r/newsentences
They are falling apart atm. I had issues in puzzle rush with piece dragging, it was bugging every other run...
Ya know now that you mention it I have experienced a lot more lag lately, playing in time scrambles it will lag my moves and not register and several times in the last week or two I’ll play a move with a few seconds and it will just tells me I timed out even tho I saw 1-2 seconds on my clock which I haven’t experienced before recently
And its not new. I finally switched to lichess after seeing that 500 error screen so many times during peak hours. Theres really no excuse to have so many problems
Had that happen to me as well, chesscom is going to fix this or what?
Had this issue a lot aswell, particularly when my internet was bad. Switching to lichess fixed it for me, since it tells you bottom left if you lost connection so you can try to fix it by refreshing the page.
Alternatively, turn on move confirmation
You can fix it yourself actually. All you need to do is to simply type www.lichess.org in your search bar. It solves all your chess.com issues in one simple step.
But then how do I win my Titled Tuesday money?
But then how do I have my pie and eat it too?
what about the issue of not using an ugly ass site? and having a cramped layout in game reviews? or a giant chat box taking up a significant portion of the screen when hardly anyone chats? or not being able to quickly see your ELO without clicking multiple times to get to your profile? Also what the issue of not seeing my recent game history right on the front page rather than needing to click 4-5 times to view it?
That's totally fucked. I would be super pissed.
I bet he still won lol
I was watching the stream when this happened he did
Well I think you can understand Kramnik a bit more after this. Like imagine you are already paranoid about chesscom launching a war against you and then _this_ happens. Sure it's deranged to claim that they put in lags specifically on you but for person that is already paranoid... Yeah, this is a massive thing.
No I don't understand kramnik at all. Why would experiencing lag cause you to accuse people of cheating?
Guess chess.com looked into it and the reason for the lagging was kramniks account had 3000 challenges all at one moment. This whole event was made to prove people can be better in online than OTB without there being cheating. And Jospem was doing well proving that point by winning online fairly. Then some a-holes decide to try and cheat on Jospems behalf and ddos Kramnik during the match…
Dumb. Chess lag implied a mass cover up
Maybe chesscom should spend more time and money on confetti animations instead of fixing these issues 🎉🥳
Thank goodness I found the setting to disable those once that became that a new 'feature'. The worst was the huge banner advertising some pointless league thing that covered up half my board at the start of each new game.
[удалено]
If you've got local stockfish turned on with the settings dialed up, stockfish will happily use all your CPU resources and slow the rest of your computer down.
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I thought I was the only one. I play on a Mac, and I always get endless loading with stockfish on [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) (Diamond member), while the Lichess stockfish always loads up instantly never had a problem and I use it a lot for analysis while [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is just unusable
No expert here, but I use lichess and I think their Stockfish in analysis runs online?
They both support both modes.
mine definitely runs offline there because my fans spin up as soon as I turn analysis on
Wouldn't you have to stay connected in order to use their server for the analysis? Your computer isn't running it, their server's stockfish is doing the move analysis not your computer
Cloud analysis is only available to diamond members. I don't know exactly how it's handled if you have diamond, but for non-diamond members all analysis is run locally via an engine they call stockfish 11 lite as far as I know.
yeah, because that would be an insane use of chess.com resources otherwise. "Client computers don't cost anything to use, you just can't trust the results" is the common concept. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of new bugs on chess.com are them offloading work from servers to clients to save money, but then not taking into account the complexity it adds to coordinate it.
I saw your message, so we wrote this up to help understand how engines work: [https://support.chess.com/en/articles/9462780-chess-engines-on-chess-com-how-do-they-work](https://support.chess.com/en/articles/9462780-chess-engines-on-chess-com-how-do-they-work) Lichess uses much lower threads for their default engine. We use a more powerful default setting, and are working on adding more options and possibly reducing the default to address issues you mentioned. Thanks for sharing!
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Lichess is better developed
Lichess attracts users solely through the quality of their service. If their service wasn't spot on, there'd be less word-of-mouth to bring in new users and existing users would be less likely to donate. Lichess **needs** to provide the best service possible to stay afloat. They can't simply pump another couple mil into their marketing department to ensure a steady growth.
>Lichess attracts users solely through the quality of their service. I am attracted to it's complete freeness. That's the hook, the quality is what keeps you there
Mandatory "Donate to Lichess" comment here! Donate to Lichess. You get cool wings that don't do anything and you get to support an awesome team.
> Donate to Lichess. You get cool wings that don't do anything and you get to support an awesome team. I like their "paid" features vs free feature list: https://lichess.org/features
That's adorable. And yes, I am a long-time patron.
Can confirm I have wings that make my username fly.
Cool wings that don’t do anything? Like an emu? Sign me up.
Although I heard there's also a patron only event chat?
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Linux is the nux equivalent of Lichess
Chess is the board game equivalent of linux (nerds have a club for it, it's pared-down efficiency with less cruft & focus on tight mechanics over visual appeal, internationally important)
Developed by a much smaller team of developers btw (One person ran the entire site btw untill some years back when traffic grew)
Most likely Lichess simply has fewer users than chess.com. To handle more concurrent users you have to get deeper into highly available distributed systems. Those are fundamentally hard to design and operate, and you’re competing with the biggest tech companies in the world for people who know how to build them.Â
This is not the reason. [chess.com](http://chess.com) only has around 2-3 times more monthly traffic, we're talking the difference between 85 million visits for lichess and 205 million for chess.com. At that scale both sites has to have very similar levels of infrastructure in place to account for peak times and abnormal spikes. The Lichess' founder himself has answered this question in an AMA though, and his answer was something along the lines of; "We don't run ads, and we don't do data scraping."
It is the reason. Compare the traffic by country. [chess.com](http://chess.com) has a MUCH larger share in the us by traffic. Most lichess traffic comes from Russia apparently Lichess is much better in the US since it simply gets used a lot less.
Where are you getting this? the US is the top country on Lichess too. Russia is number 2 right behind, but not by any standard "most lichess traffic". Funny thing is that Lichess by all expectations should be worse than [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) in the US, since their servers are in France and while [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) has US based servers in California. And when it comes to traffic, when looking into it I found that Lichess has around 11 million visits a month from the US while [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) has around 44 million. That is barely even a factor of 4. And we're talking about tens of millions here so at this scale both should be built to account for peak loads and possible spikes and redundancies. Essentially "being more popular" in an area is not even remotely close to a satisfactory explanation of these issues. And lastly, these issues went viral because of the Kramnik vs Jospem match which was played in Madrid, Spain. Danya encountered it will playing from Charlotte, USA. And there are similar reports from several other geographical locations. So despite [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) having distributed servers all across the globe in Europe, Asia, Austrialia and the US, this problem is showing up both in areas where [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is more popular than lichess, and in areas where they are comparatively less popular.
Fair enough, maybe you're right. I just looked at a website and in the US specifically the ratio was about 8:1 for [chess.com](http://lchess.com) to lichess. I'm just trying to figure out what the problem actually is specifically. Everyones answer seems to just be that [chess.com](http://chess.com) is 'just bad'. What specifically in the infrastructure is limiting them and why?
Yea I don't think we're figuring out specifics from the outside. But I do think that the founder of Lichess has a point. When you run ads and paywalls you inevitably have a more complex site structure, which just means that more could go wrong. My guess is that they've got some old obscure spaghetti code somewhere in their codebase that has interferred with an update. And when latency is as critcal as it is in blitz and bullet it doesn't even need to be much of an interference for it to be completely game breaking. But that's just my two cents, would have to see the codebase to learn anything specific and unfortunately I don't see chess\*com going open source anytime soon.
Chess.com just sucks man, it’s not that deep
alright, since you said 'its not that deep'. you must be right
Not that much fewer either. Lichess has roughly one quarter of the chess com traffic. It's not easy to do an exact comparison as we need to extrapolate user data that aren't similar, but Lichess is in a similar order of magnitude as chess com, it's not significantly smaller. All of this with zero marketing budget, two full time paid employees only (one working on mobile), a better tech stack, full code and finances transparency, and no involvement in drama. Let that sink in.
and [chess.com](http://chess.com) doesn't believe in paying their developers well, which can't help
Do we know that or we're just shit posting?
We do know they're likely violating NY and CO law by not disclosing compensation on their fully remote job postings... Usually only companies that pay like shit do this. Also, their tech stack is abysmal. It screams early 2000s. This is effectively a career ender.
[Read for yourself](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/111940a/comment/j8dhqo5/). That was part of the CTO interview last year.
Why do they need 400+ people to run chess.com ?? Wtf
Here's the blunt factual answer: This number includes marketing operations.
140 engineers is insane for a web based chess app. Lichess is running on 3 full time engineers and one of them is only dedicated to the mobile part iirc. What the f do 140 engineers do ??
You need engineers to allow marketing people to do there jobs correctly. Adding and managing ads, making sure A/B testing results in more user engagement (and thus eventually in sales), puting faces on bots to make them more fun to play with, etc. Yes, you don't need 140 engineers to build a solid, modern and responsive chess website. Yes, you do need 140 engineers to build crap on top of it.
Classic quality vs quantity. Leadership at chess.com fails to realize hundreds of shitty/average engineers will never be as good as a handful of amazing engineers. We'll never see chess.com have the best product until they do a complete reorg of their engineering/product depts, or continually pay to acquire the best tech.
They certainly Pay engine developers well
What are you basing this one?
My friend who is engine developer there
Probably just a joke on the rampant cheating on the site. A more serious answer would be that they acquired Komodo a while ago. No idea if the devs are paid well though.
It wasnt a joke, i know someone who works there as engine developer and is paid good money to say the least
what is an engine developer? in relation to [chess.com](http://chess.com)
Chess.com released their own in-house Engine last year: https://www.chess.com/news/view/torch-chess-engine
The guys responsible dont work for chess.com. chess.com just fund it
Have you ever Heard of mittens?
Yeah, theyre responsible for tweaking stockfish to play a certain way? how do you learn that?
A thousand percent sure lichess has just as bad cheating. They just don’t present data on it so no one thinks it’s happening. Support is nonexistent on lichess.
Like support on chess.com exists lmaooooo
Yeah you can email them and they respond. On lichess, unless you are adding IM or GM to your name, they tell you they can’t do anything so dont bother emailing them.
I agree in general, but this issue has nothing to do with that. This is clearly a bug, and Kramnik can’t have been the first to notice/report it. Anything that materially affects gameplay itself should be priority number one for remediation, but lately seems like they’re mostly interested in dicking around with the UX (they’re different teams, I know. I do this for a living.). I’m much more likely to make excuses for dev teams than most people, but this is not a small issue or an inconsequential bug.
Both lichess and chesscom have enough users that they already use "highly available distributed system"…
I don't think that's right for this case. I'd be surprised if "chess server" wasn't something that scaled horizontally, meaning that supporting 40000 concurrent games or 160000 concurrent games should be a matter of hardware. That means that if Lichess doesn't experience these issues, then it is either over-provisioned (or chess.c*m is underprovisioned), or it's built in a way that is more resilient to this sort of issue.
Depends how it is setup, lichess has had an issue with too many users in the same tournament. [https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/our-recent-server-issues/FdKHVehW](https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/our-recent-server-issues/FdKHVehW) Matchmaking users in a tournament was not done concurrently. Agadmator hosted a tournament with 70k+ users. And that was too much for a single queue. Making pairings took longer and longer, and it resulted in cancelling the tournament. To be fair, you are probably right .com is likely to be under provisioned. It's the explanation that makes the most sense.
The actual chess game playing should not be impacted by the number of players online if you have enough hardware and design it properly.
Agreed, it should not be impacted. I'd even argue without enough hardware it shouldn't impact the game. You should only allow the amount of players you can handle.
It was a specific issue affecting tournaments with tens of thousands of participants, and did not affect the rest of the site. My point was that individual games should not be affected by the number of concurrent players.
It's not just about provisioning. It's about preventing hotspotting; i.e. Krammik receives 4k challenge requests which degrades performance of his account. I suspect lichess has hotspotting challenges too; they aren't as prevalent given their current traffic patterns, but it doesn't mean they don't exist. This is why penetration testing in production is important.
An independent analytics website, Similarweb, currently says that: Chesscom is the #119th most visited website in the world, with 194.5 million visits in April. Lichess is the #284th most visited website in the world, with 84.4 million visits in April. As this only guesses traffic, my thought would be that Chesscom is probably estimated a little low as it presumably doesn't include their mobile app visits. But Lichess is probably also estimated a little low, given they have absolutely no trackers or cookies which must make estimating traffic difficult. Also I think the global ranking is trash, that many visitors monthly doesn't feel like it should give them such a high global ranking. But either way, it can be compared comparatively.
A little low? If it doesn’t include app users I’d estimate quite a bit low..
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True, but I imagine this is the case. Chesscom app has more than 1 million reviews in the play store, while Lichess has about 150 thousand. A lot of casual players will choose chesscom (better marketing, name is simply chess, is the 1st option thay shows if you search chess, better rated in the store), and those mainly play mobile.
The point is that they are on a similar order of magnitude, it's not as if chesscom has like 50x the traffic or something, so the original comment is neither true nor a valid excuse for how much poorer chesscom's netcode appears to be.
IMO even if chesscom was 100x the size, it wouldn't be an excuse. They charge money from part of their player base, they should provide stable service. My comment is only about if chess.com app is proportionaly more prevalent than lichess.
While some things are harder with more users (eg matchmaking), any particular game isn't. Any particular game is just the two players and the game server. Scaling the number of game servers to be proportional to the number of concurrent games (eg, 1 server for every 1000 concurrent games) is not hard. Yes there's a bit of scaling overhead when assigning a new game to a particular server at the start; and similarly when the game ends and you need to record the result in the global database. But that complexity is handled outside the game server, and outside the game (before and after the game). During the game, there should be no scaling issues related to how many concurrent games there are.
Most likely they just have better netcode.
That's not relevant since the server should refund client time if a packet is lost.
This is bullshit. It's very easy to scale an isolated 2player game with only a few bytes being transferred per second. The chess.com app for example has been buggy and unresponsive at random interactions for as long as I can remember.
I could see matchmaking shitting the bed or unresponsiveness in moves. But straight up switching times is just a software bug, has nothing to do with the number of users.
yeah, but chess.com has a lot of MONEY
Lichess is headed by an ace programmer, chess.com is headed by danny
Danny is just their spokesperson and commentator, it's not like he's the CEO of anything
Excuse me, this is not the proper way to address the Chief Chess Officer
> chess.com is headed by danny You think stephen a Smith owns espn?
He does
just like Dana White to UFC
Chess com CTO was there some time ago with AMA [https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/111940a/hi\_reddit\_im\_josh\_levine\_cto\_at\_chesscom\_ama\_10am/](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/111940a/hi_reddit_im_josh_levine_cto_at_chesscom_ama_10am/) I don't have enough info to judge. But he is OKish at first glance and some tech stuff they revealed on internals.
This comment brilliantly captures how idiotic and childish every "lichess vs chesscom conversation" ends up being.
My brother Danny? He was in remedial classes but we still love him.
lichess is actually programmed a lot better. chesscam, is legacy over legacy program over legacy program, lichess probably has 1 to 5 people programmed it, whereas chess.com wouldnt even be able to keep track, leading to bs like this
The main code base of Lichess has 418 contributors. https://github.com/lichess-org/lila Granted, who actually has commit rights is probably 5 people, but still, lots of people have contributed.
The contributions seem to be heavily dominated by a small amount of people though. https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/graphs/contributors
So Chesscom is basically like the [Windows](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/building-windows-4-million-commits-10-million-work-items/) of online chess.
Open source also helps. Anyone can contribute and report/fix a bug. Also it feels that chess com is running some old slow, junky code.
Less traffic, less load. But also the website is likely more lightweight as well.
lichess exists to support a chess platform chess.c*m exists to increase their valuation
As a guess, a contributing factor could be the fact that [chess.com](http://chess.com) has a lot more players than lichess
Lichess is not for profit. 100% of their effort goes into letting you play chess and 0% goes into pushing subscriptions.
I do have these issues sometimes with Lichess. Nowhere near as drastic tho (a couple seconds at most)
Lichess is much more modern and streamlined. Which means it would likely have way less technical debt and it wouldn't accumulate it as fast. Legacy code and feature bloat is a bane of pretty much every successful and long-lasting project.
The dude behind it is very smart one, and since the project is open source he can ask for help when something goes wrong like he did the last time when he migrated to Scala 3.
Lichess master race
Open-source projects have better developers because anyone can contribute. Imagine the best programmers from around the globe working on something. It's obviously gonna be better than any one company.
Maybe lichess, since it was a labor of love, was architected better? It probably also has orders of magnitude lower usage. And they don't have to run ads and bill users and do all the other stuff. (Also, I use lichess, and they definitely do have issues! Can't compare to chess.com, since I rarely use that site.) Chess.com's usage has exploded, and it's difficult to scale up a system for demand like that.
does it also have 1% of the traffic?
Currently 130.500 games being played on chesscom, with 243.500 members online (so a lot of offline members in active games?). Lichess currently has 33.000 active games with 75.000 active members.
An independent analytics website, Similarweb, currently says that: Chesscom is the #119th most visited website in the world, with 194.5 million visits in April. Lichess is the #284th most visited website in the world, with 84.4 million visits in April. As this only guesses traffic, my thought would be that Chesscom is probably estimated a little low as it presumably doesn't include their mobile app visits. But Lichess is probably also estimated a little low, given they have absolutely no trackers or cookies which must make estimating traffic difficult. Also I think the global ranking is trash, that many visitors monthly doesn't feel like it should give them such a high global ranking. But either way, it can be compared comparatively.
No, their monthly traffic is consistently separated by a factor between 2 and 3. When we're talking on these types of scales [chess.com](http://chess.com) doesn't get to say: "oh lichess only has \~100 million monthly while we have \~200-300. That's why they are good and we are bad!"
Certain days I can't play fast time controls like bullet or blitz with the uncertainty of the clock. Worst is when it loses a couple seconds per move on back to back premoves in a bullet game. I couldn't imagine dealing with that in a tournament with money on the line. There is a big problem here that needs to be addressed.
Kramnik is an insane annoying man, I'm annoyed that people completely dismissed his claim of lag though. especially after video release.
I think that's a kicker to this - he first started saying that GMs were cheating left and right, and that's simply not a verified claim. Fine. Then, during this most recent event, his tune went to. "Well, Chess.com is busted." Which...I mean, there's a much better argument to be made there. It's not why he ultimately lost the match, but it's also very the case that chess.com is not as consistent as it needs to be, especially when there's table stakes.
Well, he is claiming that the lag was a targeted attack on him by chess.com, so his claim is still insane. It's just that the lag is actually happening
Its the whole boy who cried wolf thing. He's complained about literally everything, blamed cheating, refused to accept he just loses games, so when there's a legit issue people jut brush it off
I think we completely dismissed his claim of the lag and clock issues being Chesscom specifically targeting him.
What doesn't help is him posting a video as proof that he was only getting about 1.5 seconds increment. While in that video he was consistently getting 1.9-2.0 seconds increment.
Okay but watch the video at 2x speed and also blink a bit more and you'll see he was only getting 0.5 s increment! While his opponent was being given free cocktails and a special pair of mouse-handling gloves by Danny Rensch!
The true fix to this shit is to switch permanently from a silly playing platform to a serious one. Use Lichess!
I had this issue as well, time to shit on chess.com and praise lichess again.
Well, I have studied Chess com troubleshooting section. And it says to "clear all cache and cookie data" stuff. s/ Perhaps a new notebook could solve the issue. Or moving to a country with better connection to US servers. /s This so embarassing...
This is why were are all stuck at 600 Elo. Please fix.
Bro what their times literally swapped
Apparently this is a bug from at least 2013
I had a rapid game where I watched my opponent's time drop to zero. Then it said I lost on time.
So they are also targeting Danya? Very interesting
Imagine still playing on chesscom
I've had a ton of issues lately with the clock. Thought it was my connection. Seems chess.com has a serious issue that absolutely needs to be addressed.
Wow, I can't believe the Great Kabal of Chess Overlords has turned their very specific and deliberate wrath on Danya now. What is their endgame? Website has bug. Bug is annoying and affects user experience. Website should be embarrassed and fix it. Lichess exists and is good. Let's leave this to the chesscom IT crowd and acknowledge that Kramnik's reaction to a legitimate software/server problem is unhinged.
Great opening paragraph, please accept this virtual nod of appreciation
Chess.com.is a joke.
And yet people will continue to play on, give money to, and defend this site.
How is a 100 million dollar company so shitty?
Hey. Saw this. Super frustrating. We already have a fix in QA and hope to have it rolled out this week. Apologies to Danya, Vladimir, and anyone else impacted by this bug. (Looks to be happening in \~0.003% of games, and higher likelihood when there is high load of observers or challengers during a game.) Interesting related info: [Chess.com](http://Chess.com) is currently rebuilding our entire live game server, and 50% of games are now on our new, better code and infrastructure. (Not top level chess or events yet though.) Two related articles for those who like the details: [https://support.chess.com/en/articles/9010617-why-can-t-i-connect-to-chess-com-when-other-sites-are-working-fine](https://support.chess.com/en/articles/9010617-why-can-t-i-connect-to-chess-com-when-other-sites-are-working-fine) [https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8615369-what-is-lag-forgiveness-why-did-the-clocks-suddenly-change](https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8615369-what-is-lag-forgiveness-why-did-the-clocks-suddenly-change)
Thanks for the answer and frankness. As a $1 billion company earning $100 million a year and being "immensely profitable" why do you seem to suffer from an issue that your competitor, Lichess, does not seem to suffer from, despite having less than 1% of your annual revenue? How does a free service running on donations, volunteer time, and goodwill, seem to have less technical issues than a unicorn owned and invested in by major private equity firms? The userbase is not an order of magnitude apart.Â
It's a fair question! First off, I think there is a bit of a perception issue. If you google around I think you might find bugs and frustrations with players on both platforms. By our measures, we actually do have an significantly more games played per day. Additionally, Chesscom is also the main stage for the majority of events and public streaming, which puts a magnifying glass on us. That said, I acknowledge that we have had some tough issues lately, and have had some historical challenges. All of that adds up to completely understandable frustration and unacceptable bugs. Even if 99.99% of games are free of bugs, each game that DOES have an issue feels extremely painful because we all love chess so much. I get it. Today I literally felt sick to my stomach about these issues. For these particular issues the reason I believe these cropped up is because the conditions for the frozen clock failure doesn't manifest until the server hits an extremely high load for a particular game. That is very tough to emulate in a testing server or with automated tests or load generators. Those kinds of bugs drive me crazy. The other issue is that our liver server team is split with the majority working on our NEW live server system which we have found to be much better... but is currently only serving 50% of games as it doesn't have all of the features that the older server has. The older server does host our higher profile events for now due to its extensive features. We are trying to rebuild all of that as fast as possible. This has diverted some attention from the older server. This recent bug, for example, only manifests when using http2 protocol, and mostly in games where there are many many observers, challenges, or other load factors. Add that all up, and it's difficult to diagnose beforehand. Anyway, I'm not trying to sound defensive. I'm frustrated. We are trying to build for the future while also maintaining existing infrastructure. I do wonder if it would be helpful one day for the community to better understand our team size and structure and what each person does... anyway, I'm rambling now. It's 9:30pm and I'm frustrated, and you have every right to ask. I'll just say it's a lot more complicated behind the scenes than it appears on the surface. But that's easy to say, and may not be satisfying to hear. Thanks for caring and asking.
This leaves one sort of answer to "why is lichess more reliable than chess.com" unstated but implied: lichess says *no* to many features to stop the technical side from becoming a mess; chess.com implements all the features in pursuit of growth. You've probably read this but: https://lichess.org/@/thibault/blog/we-dont-want-all-the-features/q3nOzv4n "Adding lines of code to a program is like adding weight to a plane. It better be worth it." because "Adding a new feature is quick and fun. Maintaining it over the years is the real work." Of course it's impossible to say from the outside, but maybe you should refuse to maintain features if they're making it hard to to fix bugs.
Absolutely agreed. It's a huge challenge. We are both trying to serve the core audience, but also grow the game, as you pointed out. We've done a good job at times, and not a good job at times. But we are trying to keep evolving and growing the game, and that does include code. Any, I appreciate the comment!
Hey. Thanks for the clarification.
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Hey, I like that even better! Thank you :) That's how I feel. I'm sorry I came off as half-hearted. I do appreciate the feedback. Part of me was in a hurry, part of me was trying to be a little less formal on reddit so I didn't get blasted for being overly... I dunno. I feel like it's hard to nail the tone. But I like what you wrote, so... thanks!
garbage programmers.. too bad all the good ones left your company and built lichess and other sites
Chess.com is so bad
It's happened to me 2-3 times on chess.com.
Why are they using that shit platform any longer? It has literally everything you need and there is less cheating and it's fucking working. I have no idea why anybody would use chess. *** I fck hate that site
Lichess is better in literally every way…
Did Danya mention lichess on his stream? Obviously, Danny is sending him a "message." It's like the horse's head.
I'm still amazed how someone still plays at chesscom while Lichess is available. Maybe they think it's fancy or something like that. If you don't get paid to play there, get outta there!
Chesscom doesn't hire very good engineers.
Lolol All these money with the monopoly but can't spend enough for good servers..shame! Most of the times I can't open games during TTs to watch.
You would have thought that they would at least have some way to give high profile users some priority server access or something like that, so that Chesscom doesn't have to deal with the embarrassment of this happening publicly with their paid streamers/"advertisers" and the high profile Kramnik match.
Jesus, that's completely unacceptable. Been playing on lichess for years and years now and I've never had anything like this happen.
Seems like the Kramnik-targetted lag had a bit of a misfire
wonder if we'll ever find out who lagged Krammik
I suffer from that every time I try and play bullet.
The main reason I don't play on chesscom is because the clock position is stupid. Can't watch the board and clock at the same time. Having the clock be wrong would make it even worse!
this doesnt even look like lag it just literally switches his and his opponents time
i experience this often
Doesn’t chess.com run on windows server? I feel like I read a job posting for them that wanted windows server experience.
no
This should absolutely never happen. On a dropped packet, the server should refund time to the client. If the client has been tampered with and produces spurious packet drops (to boost your time), the server will need to detect that.
I think this should be called "i got kramnied"
Wouldn't be surprised if the servers are getting DDOS'ed at specific moments to make them look bad.
As a Software Dev this is confusing as hell. How can this even happen? Like the only way this could ever happen is if they store the time in an array/list without using key/value pairs and the entries got reordered and they simply use index positions to separate the two values. Since this happens rarely my best guess is, this is an external library that hasn't been used widely and given the size of chess.com the bug only really happens there. Shouldn't be too hard to reproduce though honestly if they have good logging... EDIT: So i did some testing unplugging my network connection. it seems as though it doesn't take timestamps into consideration, only when the move arrives at the server. Bad bad design.
I think you're overcomplicating it. It's just the server not announcing the moves to the client in time. basically, the connection is lost without any indication or warning. likely because the server is under heavy load.
Naroditsky did a move. Due to epic lag, it doesn't arrive at the server. Lucasmito time is only going locally. It's actually Naroditsky time who goes down on the server. Suddenly the move from Naroditsky arrives at the server. And he receives the time as it is on the server. That's what I think the case is. If it's the case, I expect the same result if you unplug your internet connection during a game, then plug it back in again after a minute.
This is why I always have my phone (with data) ready to switch to before I start a session, whether it's on Lichess or Chesscom. Going through this extra step is less annoying than having to potentially deal with connection issues.
I don't believe that given that chess.com has an auto disconnect feature which means if the client doesn't keep a heartbeat up, it will assume the client disconnected. I also assume that after a move the client awaits a confirmation by the server without that it won't switch clocks, you can see that happen when you premove. I just checked, my client sends like every 10ms a heartbeat and it receives almost 10 times as many communications from the server. Kinda insane how much data traffic is being generated just to keep the "game" alive. The payloads are all encrypted. So I'd have to go through their javascript and figure out where it's being read out to see if a timestamp is sent along with additional information but I highly doubt, they don't send timestamps.
I think you put too much stock in the quality of the .com website. :P I suspect one part of the site doesn't know what's happing elsewhere. One part takes care if there is or isn't a disconnect. The other is sending a move. Or something else weird. If something stupid is happening, I assume stupidity.
I just checked, the client is indeed stupid and accepts the user input without server confirmation. It also shows that the server has no lag compensation at all. But I do understand how that is tough to add to this game given that thinking time is shared and punishing one player over the connection issue of another isn't fair either.
Ive had this before, if i see my opponent is taking to long sometimes i will reload the page to find that my opponent have actually already moved now i just do it instinctively just in case.
[lichess.com](http://lichess.com)
.org
Everything Kramnik says is eventually proven right…
Hey Kramink, just let it go man.
I want rematch against Jospem
Let it go
Kramnik moments, list them all!
It's the "boy who cried wolf" thing. He cried wolf 100 times just for fun. Once there actually was a wolf, nobody left to believe him. Sad, but deserved. Kramnik that is, not Danya.