Site Playability on RP in the last few years is VERY poor!

Replay Poker Poker Discussion
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Site Playability on RP in the last few years is VERY poor!

So today in ring I get sat out and have no option to play for many hands, but two stand out in particular.

K9s and I river trips, checked down.

The following hand I have KhThs so flop top pair and turn flush draw. The table goes to a RELOADING phase which flashes back to the table and flashes back to RELOADING several times before eventually FOLDING me and sitting me out!

The strange thing is I’m playing 2 tables and the other is working fine! Frequently 1 table will FREEZE and sit out, whilst the other table works fairly well.

The Playability has been BAD for years now from my experience. I joined back in 2015. Playing games online is always subject to internet connectivity. I dont remember it being bad at all back in 2015/2016 under the Adobe Flash tables.

Ever since the new HTTP tables took over its been hit & miss, unstable and at times UNPLAYABLE!

So I was using a very OLD laptop for a while and upgraded to a new laptop and the site suddenly worked very well, but sadly only for about a month or so…

Now the playability is often just as bad as the OLD junk laptop I was using!

Even reloading a hand or a players profile whilst playing a table will FREEZE up the table and often sit me out! This was an old issue over a year ago w my junk laptop, that was temporarily fixed or significantly less impacted playing on my new laptop. Its now frequently just as bad as it was previously.

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I agree and I’ve mentioned this several times on here. The major glitch under Adobe was the entire system going down when playing the monthly Bust the Staff game.

I do understand the reason for the switch to HTTP but I don’t understand why there are so many glitches occurring e.g., lagging, kicking players out of games, unable to open the table when the game starts etc.

The only reason I can think of is because when the transfer was made multiple algorithms were changed. I’m hoping someone would review the changes made and change them back.

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I never played on the flash site, but the new site does consume a lot of CPU. I’ve mostly had issues with how quickly it drains the battery rather than it causing the site to freeze, but that’s certainly possible. It actually just happened while I was taking a look at the CPU usge:

Screenshot 2024-02-25 at 8.33.09 PM
Screenshot 2024-02-25 at 8.33.09 PM826×734 70.2 KB

That spike across all the cores did actually freeze the table I was watching for 6 seconds, which isn’t long, but if you get that at the wrong time, it could certainly cause you to time out.

Having said that, I think the timeout/sit-out issue is different. At least for me, the client wasn’t frozen. My time bar was still progressing down smoothly, the bet slider was responsive etc. When the client side is frozen, usually everything will be unresponsive until it recovers. It seems like you’re probably hitting both issues.

I’m 99% sure I know why/when the site is slow though. The cards are stored as vector graphics and have to be converted to images. That’s expensive because the card designs are so complicated (which was actually my initial reason for wanting a simplified, solid color design). However the browser should cache the images, so once all cards have been seen, the client will run more smoothly. If cards that haven’t been seen yet are dealt, you resize the window, or open a new window though, then it has to generate new images and that could potentially cause a freeze.

If you want, you can test that by opening a table that no-one is sitting at and resize the window, and compare that to resizing an active table. The first will still use a lot of CPU and probably won’t be super smooth, but resizing the table with cards on it is going to be a jerky slideshow and send your CPU usage to 100%.

There might be other stuff going on as well, but I’m fairly sure that’s a big part of the problem, so if you can, avoid replaying hands while you’re actually involved in a pot. Also, if you can replay hands in the same tab/window, that will probably help as well. (I haven’t looked at it, but the profile page for each player also has the cards for the latest hands displayed, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was slow for the same reasons).

Sorry those suggestions basically amount to “try and play poker without cards”, but I do have one that might be useful. I doubt the card design has changed, so if you are getting worse performance now (and it is due to the card rendering), it might be your browser that has changed. It’s possible Replay will run better for you in another browser. I haven’t tested this at all, so don’t have any recommendations, might be worth a shot though.

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My CPU, on Windows 10, time 1 minute on all pictures:

1 browser tab open, my user profile on it:

Profile

1 browser tab open, 1 playing table on it:

1 table

4 browser windows open, 4 tables:

4 tables

21 browser windows open, 20 tables + my user profile:

20 tables

20-2
20-21182×41 23.9 KB

GPU for graphic on 20 open tables, 2 screens:

GPU 20

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That’s a pretty nice machine! I can’t get anywhere near that, although the old iMac I have is better than my laptop despite it having a worse CPU on paper. I notice that even on your system with just a single table it’s boosting clocks at least some of the time. Laptops won’t be able to sustain that. @DogsOfWar That might be another reason your laptop has slowed down - as the battery gets older it might be getting more aggressive with the power management.

Anyway, I compared Brave to Chrome, and even though 4 tables gets me close to 100% usage on all cores for both, Chrome is noticeably smoother. It would still be playable on Brave, but there are noticeable glitches in the card and chip animations that I don’t see in Chrome.

Taking a single table and continually resizing it is also much smoother on Chrome. I think that is the most reliable and telling test if you want to try out different browsers yourself.

Note that the profile page MAY be slow to load, but I don’t think there’s any reason to think just having one open will cause any issues. The problem would be that if it takes one second to load normally, and you do that while playing, then the two tasks might slow each other down, and now the profile page loading might be interfering with the tables for two seconds or more. It’s only going to be an issue if your CPU usage is already high, but that’s the case we’re talking about.

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HAND # 1104197758, Cards delt, Starter bets 2 chips, Everyone bets 2 chips, No one raises, We should see the flop, NO WE DON’T, Starter gets to bet AGAIN & We go round & round & round & round!

Why doesnt REPLAY ever investigate thier site BUGS!

This is NOT a RARE occasion any more, It happens ALL THE TIME

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You’re mistaken about the pre-flop betting rules. The big blind always has the option to raise (unless everyone else folds). That’s what happens in that hand, it limps around to the big blind who raises. You have to call or raise to see the flop in that case, it’s not a bug.

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Great theory and yes most browsers accept cookies etc, eating up our ram. @Poki65 could you replicate your demonstration, while using the Brave Browser for us to compare?

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Oh, cookies won’t have anything to do with this, and the CPU usage on Brave isn’t significantly different to Chrome, Chrome is probably just managing threads better so glitches less (for me) when the CPU load gets close to 100%. That can be heavily processor and OS dependent, so everyone milage likely will be different.
The point is that you can easily max out the CPU on some setups, and if that’s affecting you there might be some things you can try that might help. I don’t think it will be an issue on Poki65’s setup regardless of the browser.
The real solution would be Replay optimizing the client (likely by using a simpler card design).

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