I don't think so.

From my understanding it is triggered when theres a lot of incoming requests from a single empire in a short period of time.

Theres one thing that could possibly be done which will help a little bit without removing or lowering the limit.

As it stands now, when someone opens 100 planets in new tabs or windows, and 50 of them get the load msg, the URL of all the pages that were opened after the stress was triggered is changed to /load.php or /load.html

Make it so the URL stays the same as what was requested (but the stress msg still appears on the page). This will enable players to simply wait a while and then refresh the pages for which the stress msg appeared instead of having to find which 50 links didn't go through out of the 100 and open those particular ones all over again.

> I like pie wrote:

> that's right, but it is a protection against server load issues.

i think removing the limit is dangerous, and would indeed affect all galaxies.  perhaps a better solution would be to change the way in which players interact with systems, so they don't have to do so many new page requests.

Currently to make an attack a player has to follow one of the following routes:
1) Open the system the target planet is in from map or sidebar
2) Open the target planet
3) Click attack link to open the units input form
4) Click attack button to finally launch the attack

or alternatively

1) Click attack on the sidebar and enter the target planet coords (AttackMain.php)
2) Click evaluate attack button to open the units input form
3) Click attack button to finally launch the attack

Maybe create a new form, (perhaps on AttackMain.php) which has a field for planet coords as well as fields for each type of unit you can send on an attack.
Then make it like the market page so you can have multiple such sets of input fields on the same AttackMain.php page. This would certainly help with the mass fleet sending.

This won't improve the scenario where people open many systems quickly to do core checks etc and run into the heavy stress msg, but at least it will make mass fleet sending a lot less frustrating.

I don't think it's a good idea to be reactionary instead of preventative.  Server load problems can cause other problems which are potentially more dangerous and hard to track down, so showing the page only when there is "real" server load issues is not a good approach in my opinion.

That said, stress tests would be a good idea.  We'd have to find a good time to do them though, perhaps in between rounds.  For the time being though, I think the problem is really that players have to open 50+ tabs to do their attacks.  I think a more proper solution would be to figure out a better design for this process.

i dunno.  those are all details that stefan handles so i don't know the specifics.  what i do know, is that a single person making 50 simultaneous requests is a problem.  that means the process around attacking is designed in a broken way.

removing the limit would be putting a band-aid on the problem, instead of fixing the root cause

i don't have any influence over server configuration, so even if i did know those details it wouldn't change much of what i can do =P

but stress testing is still a good idea.  i'll add it to my list to see what kind of performance monitoring tools i can set up