Anyone experiencing sluggish response on matched bets?

[greenfingers]

Since Saturday I've noticed sluggish and varied response on my matched bets in-running on the horses. For example, when trying to close a trade, the level profit column is still showing values / my order is not matched - meaning sometimes I've hit cancel and then a new level-profit order only to find that both the level-profit orders have now been matched.

Looking at the transaction log, it shows that the cancel order for the first bet was sent, but obviously not actioned as the bet was matched. The second order was sent 3 seconds after the first. Yet this wasn't needed and there should have been enough time to register that the first bet was matched even with the 1 second IR delay.

On Saturday I put this down to poorer and more irratic response times that are common in the afternoon. But I had it on Sunday and the past two days as well. It's not frequent, I only notice it probably on 2 or 3 races a day.

Now I'm wondering if this is delay on my PC or internet. I'm using the latest beta version of BA and thinking about doing a clean install of the latest official release just to rule out any software issue that may have arisen on my system. Is this worth it? Is Betfair generally a bit sluggish at the mo? Anyone else notice it? Thanks for any feedback!

[GaryRussell]

It does sound like you a suffering a poor connection. I don't think it is an issue with BA, but would like to see a copy of the log before saying for sure. Next time it happens can you copy the log entries and send them to admin@gruss-software.co.uk (I need to see all columns of the log)
You can copy the log entries by highlighting with the mouse and pressing ctrl+c to copy to the clipboard which can then be pasted into an email.

[greenfingers]

Ok, will do. Thanks.

I agree it's likely to be internet if nobody else is having the same issue with Betfair. I looked at the "performance options" and whilst the error rates were low at under 0.5%, the slider things had gone up to around 1000 ms. Is this cause for concern?

I've never really understood those settings. Does it mean that the connection is pausing for 1 second every so often, only once or happening frequently?

Is there some way I can monitor my internet connection responsiveness for the whole afternoon and pin-point it for the times I have this issue with matched bets?

Thanks again.

[GaryRussell]

the slider things had gone up to around 1000 ms. Is this cause for concern?

Yes it means it had to increase the timeout to 1 second which means it's not getting responses within 1 second. On a good connection this will stay around 200ms, increasing occasionally but always going back down to 200ms.

Is there some way I can monitor my internet connection responsiveness for the whole afternoon and pin-point it for the times I have this issue with matched bets?

The transaction log shows the response time for each transaction, this should be all you need to know.

[greenfingers]

the slider things had gone up to around 1000 ms. Is this cause for concern?

Yes it means it had to increase the timeout to 1 second which means it's not getting responses within 1 second. On a good connection this will stay around 200ms, increasing occasionally but always going back down to 200ms.

I suppose the $64,000 question is what to do about it......
If I got a second internet connection via cable, could my PC use two internet connections simultaneously, one via ethernet, the other over wireless maybe? So that there is always a fast response? Or does it not work like this in practise?

[GaryRussell]

You cannot use two connections simultaneously to my knowledge. Are you currently using a wireless connection? If you are then I don't recommend it.

[greenfingers]

No, wired. Had it for 5 years and have only had 1 short problem some time ago so reluctant to ditch it for an alternative. I'll contact them and ask if they have had any issues recently which may be resolved.

[greenfingers]

I monitored the Performance Options throughout the day yesterday and in both instances of BA that I was running the refresh errors were always higher for Bet Refresh Timeout than for Price Refresh Timeout, sometimes double (say 1000ms to 500 or 600ms) somtimes about 1000ms to 800ms, which seemed odd to me.

This morning I turned off the "Automatically Adjust" option to see any changes in the result. I was checking through some markets and after having BA running for about 2 hours, mainly in the background not doing anything, I looked at performance options and the results were basically the same.

Then I uninstalled the Beta and installed v65m and left it running for an hour whilst I was out, so it was just ticking over in the foreground. I had the same refresh time-outs as before - both set at 320ms and the main refresh rate on the grid interface @ 0.5 secs. There was 0 errors on the bet refresh (out of 440) and just 0.5% on the Price Refresh (out of about 8000) which was quite a surprise.

Now I know that this is a moveable target as if the cause of the problem is my internet connection or Betfair response times, perhaps they have just been working correctly for the past hour, so I'm not saying it's a fault with the beta version, but I'd really appreciate it if you can try to replicate it. It seems very likely that plenty of other users would have spotted it. If it wasn't a problem with my internet then it could still be some sort of conflict with other software on my system (a windows update?) and the beta version, perhaps?

Thanks for any help you can give.

[GaryRussell]

Both versions are the same as far as refreshing bets and prices go so there isn't anything I can fix in the Beta to make it the same as the official release. I am also not seeing any difference in the response times here. I think any difference you saw must have been purely coincidental.

I didn't mention it before, but sometimes rebooting your router from time to time can sometimes solve connection problems. You could give it a try.

[greenfingers]

Ok thanks a lot for that. I switch off the router every night, but I have had it for 5 years now so I was wondering about asking the ISP for a new model in case a newer one works better in any way.

Is there any detriment to response times by me running 2 instances of BA? I have 16mb connection so bandwidth isn't a problem, but would bet refresh requests to Betfair get rejected if one had been received very closely after another?

What it the downside to me deselecting "automatically adjust" in performance option? Response times seem to be less lumpy in this mode.

Thanks again.

[GaryRussell]

Is there any detriment to response times by me running 2 instances of BA? I have 16mb connection so bandwidth isn't a problem, but would bet refresh requests to Betfair get rejected if one had been received very closely after another?

Doesn't cause problems to my knowledge.

What it the downside to me deselecting "automatically adjust" in performance option? Response times seem to be less lumpy in this mode.

Say you set it at 200ms for example and everything is working ok. If the response times then slow down then you could end up with the majority of the requests timing out because it's not increasing the timeout to handle this which is what "auto adjust" does.

[greenfingers]

Thanks for the info.

I've got a new router on its way to me, managed to persuade them to send it for free too If that doesn't help I'll get new line filters and see if they'll test the phone line to get to the bottom of the problem.