When PlayCanvas bogs down

In my last couple of months working in PlayCanvas me and my partners have noticed that we get anomalous behavior that appears to be correlated to certain times. These things include project launches where the scene is not loaded correctly, failures for changes in Editor and in scripts to propagate forward (lines deleted are still referenced as errors on console even though line has been deleted from script), and very slow responses to forking, archiving and otherwise copying projects.

So I’m starting this topic to log the times when I receive super slow responses that appear to originate from the PlayCanvas “mothership” in hopes that this helps narrow down the potential causes. Sundays are notoriously problematic. And we’ve found that on Sundays we sometime just quit working in PlayCanvas because these kinds of issues interfere so much and become frustrating and counterproductive.

About 15 minutes ago I attempted to fork a VERY simple project. The fork has still not completed. So I will cancel it now and retry.

I cancelled the Fork panel by clicking the X in the upper right. I went to re-fork it but on doing so discovered that the fork had actually been made. Apparently it was just the fork panel that got stuck and wasn’t updated.

Got the script error reference to an undefined variable that points to a line in our script that has no relation to that variable at all. But the line is the line where that variable existed previously. So it appears that when PlayCanvas rebuilds the app for launch that the previous contents of the script are still buffered and the buffered contents are used rather than the contents we currently have in the script. This is the type of thing that tends to happen at time when we see other apparent system slow downs. The only resolution we’ve found is that sometimes deleting the whole line, saving the script, and then re-inserting the line will clear the problem. The intuition is that more editing eventually gets the out of sync buffer to refresh and get back in sync with the actual line of code.

For a neophyte learning Playcanvas and coding, this has been maddening in that you think you have a code issue but, in fact, you don’t. But if you don’t figure out its a system problem, you end up wasting a LOT of time chasing a ghost. We can confirm that the code is correct - because the identical line does work correctly once the system gets back in sync. At this point we’ve become better at spotting the times when it is the system making the mistake and not ourselves. So we chase ghosts less often now. But we still have to edit and re-edit in an attempt to get the buffers (or whatever is the source of the problem) in sync.

Never updated Fork screen again today. Sunday, of course. But the fork did succeed. I just manually closed the Fork status screen after 10 minutes or so of not updating.

I’ve experienced the editor screen not updating (when creating scripts or folders) and long load times for playing projects, but I’ve assumed it’s my (relatively) slow internet connection. I haven’t done much programming but intend to start so I’ll watch for any strange behavior in the code editor.