Life In 19x19

I just played a nightmare game through the KGS app.

Every once in a while during my opponents turn his time went by. But then, when he played, the time switched back as if I has been thinking that amount of time.

Example :

We both have 15 minutes left. My opponents turn. He strangely uses one minute for an obvious move. Then is my turn but, at the beginning of my turn, the clock shows 14:55 for him and 14:00 for me.

Actually I think that my opponent played within the first ten seconds but I didn't get the move till a minute later. During this time, the server assumed the clock was running for me. This server bug (a sort of unilateral lag) forced me to resign the game since I would lose on time eventually. We were around move 120 and I had only 2 minutes left form the initial 15.

I was playing through a 3G connection and webpages loaded fine... So it's not the ISP or my phone...

It's quite likely a connectivity problem. The fact that webpages load fast does not mean that KGS is loading fast, or that KGS messages are arriving fast. This happens when there is a more-than-significant lag in the connection.

In fact, it may be that your ISP has a caching server between connections and the real world: the pages you were browsing were "popular" pages? (like newspapers, news sites, etc)

The site I tried was, indeed, a news site. I was playing on my cell phone so I just checked that the connection worked fine. I didn't think about the caching server.

So... Once we know this issue exists isn't it possible to solve it from the server side?

One solution would be to send a "I've received your move" pingback when the cell phone receives the move. This would actually set the initial time for the turn...

I'm pretty sure there's some reason why this is not already implemented, after all it would make disconnections far easier to manage (last Saturday I lost 3 minutes of game time and 10 minutes of real time because I had been disconnected, and wondering why my opponent was taking so long.) I can't be sure why, though, it depends on how KGS is engineered, and I have no idea how the clock is working.

I agree that this sounds like it was a lag issue. Unfortunately, there is no way to solve this problem unless you are willing to trust the client computer clock (which opens all sorts of doors for cheating). There have been chess servers that try to solve it (on computers) using a local native timing program...but even that got broken into...