Anyone else getting a lot of odd Skritter behavior today? So far today I have had:

Repeated segments of items due (The exact same five items due in the exact same order 3 times in a row. Happened with three different sets so far.)

Abnormally long lag times

The whole thing locked up twice

Anyone else getting this or is it me for some reason?

Yeah, it's the App Engine craziness. If you open your Javascript console you'll probably see a bunch of 500 Server Error messages.

See http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=47619540

James

That is true. Did check at Google as well and they still do some work. You can check the status of the app engine at Google: http://code.google.com/status/appengine Currently there are problems with the data store and that exlains the exreme delyas we have. Most of those 500 errors are in fact time outs getting the data. At least for me. I will actually take a break now and walk to work while listening to chinesepod. It is not the end of the world when skritter is down but almost feels like that;-)

I have been having the same kinds of problems. I have also noticed the following one a few times yesterday and today:

studied 86 sec ago: not due (0%)

I am getting a character I just practiced, got right and which I obviously remember well. It seems Skritter knows it is not due (0%) but is still giving it to me.

I've been experiencing this too.

I'll credit all y'all's accounts for a day--it's this App Engine serving thing causes too many of the progress saving requests to fail. The app can deal with a surprising amount of failed requests, but not this many! I like to think of the beleaguered Flash app as a fighter being swarmed with tons of baddies: he keeps kicking them away, but too many jump on and he goes down, continuing to struggle defeatedly under the mountain of dudes.

Hi Nick:

Do you think this will be fixed soon or is this app engine issue something outside of your system and control? I am just restarting skritter after a few months break and now I am having trouble adding anything to my queue. In fact I am having trouble posting this message due to server timeouts and errors too.

The App Engine team said that they've improved things as of half an hour ago in an IRC chat, so let's hope they're right. They're usually pretty good about this and we do have very good uptime overall.

It is behaving in a much more stable manner this afternoon. It is much better for me.

Side question: I am blowing through the queue trying to get back down yesterday's load. If I just double tap the spacebar on a writing part does that mark the word as known or too easy? Some of these things I have recently added to my Skritter are words and characters I have known for ages and they were just added because I turned on the HSK5 list. The ones that I really need I am writing as usual, but some words, 宝贵 for example, don't really need the writing practice.

好像变好了，大家很辛苦了啊，我很佩服你们，尤其是谷歌公司的系统管理员，尽管如此还是那句话吧【下不为例】哈哈

When you press the space bar without doing the prompt, it grades it as a normal 3 (which is why it starts out with a green border). You have to press 4 to get the "too easy" grade.