Submission Timeouts / Poor messaging

[studentprogrammer]

Most of the time I'm getting submission timeouts for the last couple hours although the site status indicates everything is fully operational.

[msmichellegar]

I'm getting mostly submission timeouts too.

[ThomWright]

Same 😞

[bkaestner]

Same here. I think that an additional message on submission timeouts would be great, something like

Submission timed out. Please try again.

---

This doesn't mean that your code is wrong. Instead, our servers are currently a little bit busy and cannot test your submission. You can check status.codewars.com and our twitter for current status information.

That explains the issue to new users and disambiguates submission timeouts from processing timeouts. (Edit: Whoops, just noticed that the additional message is more or less a feature request, not a valid issue comment, sorry.)

[afonsomatos]

Same here..

[jhoffner]

@afonsomatos is this still happening for you? I just restarted the workers about 20 minutes ago and things should be operating as normal.

The issue is that the background jobs stop processing items from the queue. I'm looking at upgrading to the latest version to see if that fixes the issue.

@bkaes good suggestion.

[jhoffner]

I've deployed upgraded versions of a few of the background worker components, which should hopefully not cause any regressions and fix the instability issues. The problem is not reproducible in development so all we can do is sit and wait to see if it happens again.

I've marked this an enhancement due to @bkaes suggestion.

[afonsomatos]

@jhoffner It is alright now

[mdibaiee]

I use Codewars everyday, and this often happens. I really love Codewars but this problem is annoying.

[bkaestner]

If I'm not mistaken, any changes on tests in the kata editor (either hidden or example test cases) will trigger a test run. This doesn't bode well if there are currently submission timeouts: the kata editor will stay in the "preparing state" infinitely.

I think this is connected to submission timeouts and not an entirely different issue.

(btw, as of 2015-04-07T07:28:00+02:00, submissions are timing out again)

EDIT: I've gotten tired to write the same comment over and over again, so I've written a wiki page here on github. Funny enough, github doesn't state the licence used for wikis, but if you want to use part of the page for your own purposes, feel free to do so.

[ryanthames]

With the exception of a few lucky submissions, I've been getting nothing but submission timeouts since about 11pm CST last night.

[foiseworth]

9/10 of my submissions now result in a timeout. It has got progressively worse over the past two days.

[msmichellegar]

I'm getting 9/10 timeouts too, although at least it sometimes lets the code go through.

[franksloan]

Yep loads of timeouts from me too