Pokemon Go, the AR-ready game that has even the most lazy people walking around town is now getting additional over-the-top services, like Go Messenger, Poke Radar, etc. developed by dedicated engineer fans.
Ever since the nostalgia-driven Pokemon game debuted a couple weeks ago, fans have been attracted to the game — like a moth to the flame. Even though Niantic has been cautious of making the game available in phases, to select countries at a time, it has still experienced a lot of server downtime issues due to overload.
There’s a solution to it, and one which makes sure you know when to go out at 4 a.m. in the morning to catch a rare sighting and when not to.
IsPokemonGoDownOrNot is a website that tracks Pokémon GO‘s server availability and login wait time to analyse the current situation of the game’s servers. Built by a band of engineers(who are big-time Pokemon fans) working in New York based cloud monitoring startup Datadog, logs into the game servers using a Pokemon Trainer Club account every 30 seconds. The service then checks to know how the servers are responding and also shows you the data for the past two days.
Creators of the service say that if it takes more than 8 seconds to login, then the game is at a warning level. If the login time reaches 15 seconds, then it is at a critical level of capacity. Similarly if the uptime percentage drops below 95% then it’s at a warning stage, while dipping below 90% would mean the servers are about to crash. It also displays the server latency(meaning the amount of time it takes for the host server to receive and process a request for a page object) and is expected to be below 0.8 seconds for smooth functioning of the game.
The game’s servers reaching a critical state doesn’t necessarily mean the game will noticeably crash. Servers ideally are architected to have one take over if there is a failure, so it doesn’t always lead to that,
adds Vianney Tran, creator, IsPokemonGoDownOrNot.
The team with the data it has collected and analysed says that Pokemon Go is most prone to server downtime when the East Coast of the U.S. wakes up, or when a new region it added. The team is now also working on adding the ability to test the servers using Google account login in a couple of days.
