I don’t know if I should write on these forums again since no one ever responds to it or seems interested to talk, exchange or support/propose ideas or suggestions, even though I see many ‘view’ from the posts I have made already. Is this community of engine enthusiasts still alive? Do you guys care?
Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I am experimenting random disconnections (a lot in my book) that I feel reflects badly on the rating of the engine and ranking in the Computer Pool. I have encountered at least 15+ random disconnect up to now (since start of December 2015), and this is getting on my nerves. Wasting computer power for 24h to inch up 30 or so rating point just to get dropped lower because of 2 random disconnect back to back? Come on, there’s got to be a better way of handling this without penalizing rating.
My link to the Internet is stable (Fiber up to my router), and connection to chessclub.com (ip 207.192.66.15) is the only one suffering any disconnections like that, so often I might add. I can’t pin point where this is happening, but it is not from my end as I am monitoring it since a few weeks already when I noticed those strange losses in a row from the game logs (no outcome was listed). I write now because I just witnessed two of these random disconnections while I was watching an engine match, all the while connected (RDP) to 2 servers for maintenance (I am a network admin). So I know it was not my end that suffered the connection drop else I would have lost all my connections.
When the connection drops, it is instantly restored (in less then a second - thanks to Chess Assistant software reconnecting as I requested him to do). So that tells me that somewhere between me and chessclub.com, near their server(s) their is an issue with connectivity from time to time, or it is their server that drops the connections for whatever reason. Why I say near? If it was a real Internet issue along the route, it would have taken the re-connection more then a second to reroute to their server, or the reconnection would not have been able at all if no other route were possible. Tracing the connection’s route gives me always the same major hops between me and chessclub.com except I can’t see what is beyond their firewall, which is normal, but I suspect the problem is from their firewall to the chessclub.com server.
My suggestion to ICC is to let a grace period of 30s before forfeiting the match when a random disconnection happens. Let the clock run if it is our turn to play, but don’t forfeit the match because of an Internet hickups, or your telecom/server equipment is having some glitches.
