Has anyone else found that in the last month or so, Skritter has gotten much slower in terms of responding to inputs and commands? I feel like every other flashcard I do, I need to hang around and wait for something to load, or the site freezes and I need to force quit (in fact, I've gotten the spinning beach ball a good four times just while typing this).

I've been using it for the better part of a year now, and it used to be much snappier. I considered that it might be down to my computer or internet connection, but I don't have this problem with other sites, whereas I am having the Skritter issue not only at home on my Mac, but also at work on pretty much every PC I've tried it on. I've tried different browsers, as well, with no notable improvement.

Anyway, just wondering whether I'm the only one who's having this problem (and if so, what I can do to fix it). It's rendering Skritter practically unusable- I dread doing flashcards now because I can't just crank through them the way I used to.

You can always try the other domain name. If I find one is sluggish I'll switch to the other, which is usually fast. Use either skritter.com or skritter.cn .

I am experiencing the same problem. As I am writing this comment, it is happening again this morning, when I loaded this page, it also took quite some time. Last week, it was quite severe, then I read Nick's comment about Google chrome and I switched over to Chrome. It was amazing fast (I used IE and Firefox before). But this effect is still going on, although less severe than beforehand. I saw no much difference in the past, whether I used .cn or .com. Also, if I use it at home or in the office, it's not much difference.
I'm just finishing writing this and at this moment, Byzanti's image was loaded and shown on the page - so it took soooo long.
Before any other feature or nice to have, I would wish, that this problem could be solved, I think, it has more impact on the learning and the motivation than any feature.
Roland
P.S.:when I was pressing OK, it could not be finished but instead an error message about server error popped-up.

Currently it is taking over a minute between characters--unusable at present. Please tend to this quickly.

Well, I'm in China, using the .com presently, and it's super fast....

I just tried the .cn and it is normal (fast) speed.

concerning the speed of the writing app itself:

The Google App Engine has been embarrassingly unreliable these days, especially yesterday:

e.g. http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/2011/01/27#ae-trust-detail-datastore-query-latency

http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/taskqueue/2011/01/27#ae-trust-detail-taskqueue-execution-latency

Today, as of now, it's really bad in terms of datastore query latency, although the Skritter script is currently executed promptly. I guess taskqueue execution latency is the more important parameter。

http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/2011/01/28#ae-trust-detail-datastore-query-latency

After getting a hold of some App Engine experts, I've set out a master plan to minimize exposure to bad Datastore performance and to speed things up in general. I'll be working on that for the next several days, and hopefully we can toss these slow response zones into a canyon. Thanks for your patience guys.

Please make sure you pick a real deep canyon. Perhaps even a crevasse. :-)