Good day,
I just wanted to follow-up on our Daytona 24 hour race. Sorry for the delay. We were doing a technical analysis of the connection issues that occurred for some and we wanted to completely understand the issues.
Some people, most, in fact, had no issues and hopefully had a fun race. Others did not however and again we sincerely apologize. Nobody is more disappointed than us. We have worked hard and invested heavily to minimize any conceivable issue. We absolutely understand that these big endurance races are special and that our members put much into it including team meetings, practice, clearing schedules of work, family and social activities. We too obviously share your passion. We had seven people monitoring the race.
The main issue is that one of the servers, hosting 4 splits, encountered networking issues. Server number 15, it is one of our newest batch of servers, but that one particular server was using different networking hardware. It has been on-line working fine for several months.
Once you are disconnected, you are disconnected. You have to connect back to that same server. If that server continues to struggle, you may encounter on-going problems, and many of you did on server 15. Each server has two network groups, active and passive. If the active group fails, you should bounce over to the passive group and everything is still good but we encountered issues with that on this server. We were scrambling behind the scenes with this server as this was going on, but once in that situation, it is a poor experience no matter how quickly we react and right the ship. After all, it is race and every second counts.
A full "autopsy" was done on this server, and we strongly believe we figured out why it failed and corrected the problem. It is now passing all of our load testing. However, it is not needed so we will keep it offline for the 12 hour event race next weekend, the Bathhurst 12 hour race, to be extra safe. We do run two different races when it comes to the 12 hour races; the Bathhurst 12-hour race’s are starting next Saturday, February 10. While we were at it, we just did an audit of performance, reviewed settings and tested every server.
We also had another problem at the outset which lead to some people struggling to initially register for the race. We know that is frustrating and should not happen. That also has been corrected and measures put in place, so it hopefully does not happen again.
There is a lot of technology involved, and it is the Internet. We don’t control everything, and there will not be perfect connections for everyone all the time, especially for a race that last 24 hours. However, what happened in this race is certainly not acceptable to us, and we know you. Again, our apologies
