World’s Biggest Chess Site Is So Popular, Fans Can’t Play Now

The good days (if there ever were) of the covid pandemic are still being felt today with the growing popularity of online chess. However, the world’s largest chess website has fallen victim to the king’s game success as its servers struggle to keep up with the game’s online popularity.

Yesterday, Chess.com, the first platform for online chess games, published a official statement in a blog post which explains why their servers are struggling, why the game has become so popular, and how they plan to fix website database crashes, according to Gamer on PC.

According to Chess.com, website traffic has doubled since December, propelling the app to the second most popular free game on the iOS App Store in the United States. For five days in January, Chess.com set new site records for active members and hit one million visits from Google for the first time on January 19. Chess.com set a site record of 31,700,000 games played on January 20. shows no signs of slowing down as the site regularly has over a million games played per hour.

Chess.com said the chess boom was the result of “lockdowns, Pogchamps and The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix.” The stars of the popularity of the game over the past three years are the photo of football players, admittedly baller Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo play the gamethem infamous anal beads scandaland hosting popular streamers wacky chess tournaments.

“Back when chess started to explode during the COVID lockdown, our servers were struggling to handle the traffic. We made a lot of investments in hardware and other improvements that allowed us to scale “Wrote the Chess.com statement. “When the Queen’s Gambit boom happened, we experienced another massive increase in traffic, mostly without service interruption.

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Image: Chess.com /Kotaku

To further explain how much stress the Chess servers are under, Chess.com added a chart of the site’s daily active members. According to the site, there are more than 250,000 new accounts created each day. In addition to servers having to account for thousands of players commenting and chatting during matches, the Chess.com database must also contend with the staggering 16,000 chess moves made per second on average.

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While Chess.com technically has a good problem on its hands, it’s nevertheless a problem that causes its databases to warp under the stress of its concurrent player base. Indeed, when writing this article, the Chess.com the landing page was down due to data overload.

I was going to look for a chess related pun and forgot lol. I’m part of the problem. Ah, Eto… Bleh. Screenshot: Chess.com/Kotaku

“To address the challenges our databases face, we separate database tables, partition databases, and in-memory services. We are also working on dividing our most problematic database with users and gameplay. Each of these things takes time because there is SO MUCH DATA to move,” wrote Chess.com. “We’re also working on more ‘graceful’ failures so that if things go wrong and everything runs out, we can recover faster and with fewer interruptions.”

Chess.com ended its blog post by reassuring players that it would be rolling out “more short-term fixes today” which should stabilize players’ online experience and have a much better and more stable experience by now. the end of the week. Other major updates will be implemented in the next two to three weeks.

“We love you, we feel you, we’re sorry and we’re working as hard as we can to get back to stability and provide the best possible experience now and in the future when we hit 15 million or even 20 million. people playing chess in a day,” Chess.com wrote. “Chess is amazing, and it’s a joy to share this game with you all.”