Recurring "Hmm.. We're having trouble connecting. Try refreshing?"

Glitch Feedback
1

Hey,

Really cool so far. However, when I work for some time in the editor, it tends to throw me this error every 5-10 minutes. I then usually have to wait 2 minutes for it to come back.

Hmm… We’re having trouble connecting. Try refreshing?

I don’t remember having this problem with my previous project (at least, not as often). The only big difference is that this one uses websockets (in this case socket.io)

Is this a normal behaviour? Is there something I could do on my side to reduce the frequency of this problem?

Thanks! :smiley:

1 Like
2

Sorry to hear that. Certainly isn’t normal behaviour - I’ve seen it from time to time myself but certainly not for that long or frequently. Does refreshing your browser tab help? We’re working on some major backend changes, which we hope will help with issues such as this, but we’re a few weeks from having them available. In the meantime, if I can get the project name then I can try to reproduce it. Thanks.

3

I haven’t had the problem today so far, so it’s ok!

I’ll let you know if I find a pattern when it happens.

4

Hi there, I have been having this problem quite often on my own project (bloom-thief). Some of the worst occurence involved the page being frozen for a couple seconds and then my work reverting to a previous state.
I am using Chrome on Windows, and thought some of my extensions might be causing problems, namely “Https everywhere” and “Disconnect”. Disabling them helped somewhat, reducing the occurence to every 20mn instead of every 5mn.

5

Having this problem constantly at the moment. It is becoming unusable as I keep loosing changes.

Can’t see any pattern - seems to be happening once or more a minute at times.

EDIT : Just received “We’re Too Popular
(シ_ _)シ
Looks like we’re over capacity. We’re working hard to get back up”

Is this the problem? Any timescales for a resolution?

6

Sorry to hear that @rcsl! These issues are usually server-specific, so as a temporary workaround you can try remixing your project and hopefully it’ll be on a different server. Meanwhile, I’ll get the team to kick the servers and our long-planned server improvements are almost at completion, which should provide a more conclusive resolution to such problems. I’ll let you know when we have something to announce on that front.

7

I am now having this problem and it is annoying!!! It is happening almost 3 times in 5 minutes

8

I am experiencing some problems now! It is almost like its asking for a refresh every few seconds

9

Sorry the hear that - we had some trouble with a particular server, which should be resolved. Let me know if you’re still having problems.

10

I experience the same issue, also with a socket.io related project. In it’s current state, the environment is pretty much unusable. It allows me to edit for a couple of minutes, then crashes and comes up after aprox. 3 minutes, repeating the cycle.

11

There is a rather simple way to solve this for the user without fixing upstream libraries or even the doing very much on the server side.

The GUI and the connection to the server should not live in the same window, because you only really need to reload the connection window to reestablish the connection and the GUI can carry on as normal, without the user having to step away.

Basically, the GUI should load in the top frame, and the page that holds the socket to the server should be in an iframe
inside it. When connection is lost, only the iframe should reload.

Meanwhile, the GUI page should store its state on the client (probably IndexedDB), so that it can be synced with the backend when it gets reconnected, even if the user has closed the tab in the meantime.

12

Still seeing this; the system resets and loses the last minute of work every couple of minutes. Not using Socket.IO, so it doesn’t seem to be related.

13

Hi Sparkdust,

sorry to hear that! can you give us the name of the project you’re working on? Lately it has been very rare, and a transient situation… if you get it consistently, we will immediately investigate!

14

This has only been a major problem for the last couple of days; before that it happened a couple times a day rather than every few minutes

15

Meant to include just the link, not the gomix.com header. The project name is crimson-avenue

16

Hi Sparkdust,

it looks like that project is private, so I cannot access it. I’ve tried to restart the editor backend manually, can you check if it works better now?

17

Saw another reset since your message; made the project public. Was still happening every 1-2 minutes; now hasn’t happened in 15 minutes.

Site doesn’t seem to be publishing anymore, so going to reboot.

Ok, the “publishing” problem was just a side effect of the “trouble connecting” issue. The changes I had made (in neutral.js) weren’t saved, so I saw an old version when I went to the web site. When I rebooted, the changes weren’t there; when I re-made them the correct version appeared.

It doesn’t seem to be a problem with my connection, since I was able to load new pages in the browser even while the work wasn’t being saved in the gomix IDE.

19

I’m perfectly prepared to believe that this happens more often with a poor connection, since it does seem to happen more often in certain locations. That said, the connection isn’t terrible:

  1. Gomix always immediately reconnects within 1 second of showing the “Hmm …” message
  2. I can use other active server-backed web services and games without seeing anything similar

It seems that, when there is a momentary connection glitch, the choice is being made to throw out work since the last autosave. It is technically possible (other sites do it) not to throw out the work, but to simply retry and resume saving once the connection is re-established.

20

Hi Sparkdust,

This is unfortunate :frowning: may I ask you some additional questions?

  • how often do you see this behavior? We deploy few times a day (0-10, depending on the day…), and during the deploy the editor disconnects briefly. If this is the range of times you see the disconnections, it’s unlikely that you’re experiencing server instability. On the other hand, if it happens more often, we will look into it immediately!

  • offline editing is on our to-do list. We understand that it is very desiderable, and we are figuring out ways of implementing it in a stable way. However, at the current time the “content reset” should be very very small, in the order of seconds of work. What’s your experience? How much time of work you see reset when a disconnection happen?

Thanks again for your feedback!

21

I see the issue every few minutes. I generally lose between 5s - 1min of code, plus it resets to the top of the file. I have seen a few cases of larger losses.

Last time I was running ping gomix.com (pinging every second) in a different window while I was working. I saw the issue as usual, and my ping times ranged from 63.8 to 93.8 ms; there were no excessive ping times.

22

We are really sorry to hear that.

It might be related to RAM usage. Do you know if your project or any of the libraries it uses consumes a large amount of memory?

Moreover, would you mind giving us access again to the project? You can send the join link to me as a PM.

Thank you, and sorry for all the trouble! We really appreciate your feedback :slight_smile:

23

I made it public. There’s a fair amount of code, but nothing particularly
large afaik

24

Also note that this happens a lot when I’m at work, but seldom at home, so
it does seem like it may have something to do with the connection (although
the ping times are reasonable at work).

25

“Offline editing” would be overkill for my needs. The network hiccups are
significantly less than 1s long (as shown by the ping times). The trouble
is that a 100ms hiccup can kill a minute of work (better people than I
would only lose a minute, but for me it often takes a couple of minutes to
track down what exactly was deleted, so I am frequently typing the same
code several times).

26

Hi Sparkdust,

Yes, I perfectly understand the situation… Losing work is never a nice experience, and it gets some time just to focus again on what you just typed.

Thanks for telling us it only happens on certain connections. I tried to remix your project and play with it with various network conditions, but without any “luck”: I couldn’t reproduce your experience. We are actively working on making the experience more stable on a wider variety of connections, starting from immediately telling the user when the connection goes away.

At this point, I’d say that it’s a connectivity issue. But just to clear any other possibility, I suggest you to remix your project too and see if you experience the same bugs on the remix. If the problems go away, then perhaps the virtual drive that your project use has some hidden failure (which I deem very unlikely, but…).

Keep us posted :slight_smile: thank you!

27

Hi Sparkdust,

as a temporary solution, until we work out ways of improving the overall link between the client and the server, do you think the situation would improve if we tell you immediately when a change to the file you are editing is not sent to the server within a reasonable amount of time? This would at least tell you that the connection has been lost or is flakey…

28

Although it would be useful to know that I’m about to lose work, I would
consider that significantly lower priority to the longer-term fix of making
sure that the work continues over a connection hiccup.

29

Thank you :slight_smile:

we always prefer to provide incremental improvements instead of starting directly on a long term solution that might take weeks or month to achieve :slight_smile: I agree that our target will be to provide a good experience even in presence of connection hiccups.

Sorry again for this inconvenience, we hope to be able to close this bug very soon!

And thanks for all the feedback.

1 Like
30

I see this error with 100% consistency when pasting in a large-ish text file (750kb). Dragging-and-dropping the file has the same effect — text appears, this error is shown, and then the content of the file disappears.

Is there some undocumented limit I’m running into, or is this a bug?

54FB729A-C7C5-41A6-AA68-F00BA85120AF-970-00005D8185C26C36.gif1200×758 988 KB

31

Yep - that’s it. There’s a limit on the size you can paste. Try doing it in stages or import it as part of a repo.

32

Thanks! Pasting in chunks of ~2000 lines worked. I can’t import from GitHub repos because of the permissions required, but probably I should try to get this into NPM instead of a 750kb JS file. :slight_smile: