Subject: save button not saving

Date: Fri Jun 15 20:06:34 2018
User: ORLOO
Message:
is it going to be fixed?

Date: Sat Jun 16 07:18:15 2018
User: TitanicTony
Message:
It is working for me, same as always! All the "save" button does is pause the clock (so you can think, without adding [lots of] minutes to your playing time). If you log-out (or exit the site), the game is saved automatically (and the clock stops until you return).

Date: Sat Jun 16 09:48:40 2018
User: joeygray
Message:
Strictly speaking, the save button also logs you out of the game. The external effect of that is that the game site no longer presents your current game to you. Any studying you do must be based on either a pretty darn good memory or (of course) external aids such as writing down the position or taking a screen shot before you saved. The save button is of course intended for use when you are stepping away from the computer and the game completely, like when the wife calls you to dinner or the pastor stops by or the like. Using it for studying the game is rigging the time stat. Another case of lying to yourself about how good you are.

Date: Sat Jun 16 10:46:07 2018
User: TitanicTony
Message:
On my pc, the game remains displayed, but with a few cards covered up by the little "game saved" message. I prefer to use a screen shot. Even so, my "time per game" ranks are mostly rather poor.

Date: Sat Jun 16 11:29:28 2018
User: TitanicTony
Message:
Btw, Joey, I think it probably helps overall site performance for players to be logged out as much as possible. For example, by saving the game until (for whatever reason) they are ready to make their 1st move. Or, they could logout while they compose their next DB message on a text processor. Or, They could download all (or part) of a DB thread to their text processor (copy-n-paste), and then log out while they read it (and composed their response). Maybe then the site response times wouldn't sometimes be so slow. Do you agree, Joey? [Or, maybe the occasional slow site responses are due to total internet traffic, and not just to the traffic on the freecell site?]

Date: Sat Jun 16 13:51:33 2018
User: joeygray
Message:
I hardly ever use the save myself, so I just tested it, and yes what you say is true, the image of the game is still there under the dialog box until you hit ok. THEN it disappears. Since I don't care about time I wind up, either when quitting for any reason OR studying the screen long enough, running into the server-side time out which is about 15 minutes. I would say that having a game open on the server only affects performance infinitesimally. If you are not making moves then the client side is not communicating, so all that remains is taking up one slot in the server's table of open games, which shouldn't affect performance at all, and possibly a very small increase in time spent looking through the open list. If he hashes the table and sizes it big enough, it's going to make almost no difference.

Date: Sat Jun 16 16:56:02 2018
User: TitanicTony
Message:
Thanks Joey. I feel like I have hijacked this thread. If "having a game open on the server only affects performance infinitesimally", then why have a "server-side time out" as short as 15 minutes? Denny could have made it an hour (or 5 hours). Maybe the reason is historical. Also, I wonder what 1000 (or 10,000) "infinitesimals" add up to? It seems to me that even Google is getting slower than it used to be, presumably due to heavier traffic!??

Date: Sat Jun 16 21:33:58 2018
User: joeygray
Message:
No, the reason is actually player-friendly. No matter what the reason you stopped making moves was, your time stops at 15 minutes after the last client update. People like me, who start a game and then start watching football or something and never get back to the game until tomorrow or even next week, would get enormous game times. It's a fairly reasonable, and nice, guess on Denny's part that if you haven't moved in 15 minutes you aren't playing any more. Of course I get the benefit, too, on those odd occasions when I actually study a game without moving for an hour or more. But almost always Denny's guess is correct. The database access cost of somebody actually playing a game utterly dwarfs any cost of somebody not playing one but not telling the server about not playing.