another milestone

these past few days have been crazy to say the least. on personal front, it is time to repay another loan which means countless rounds of agony and torture for me to get the funds ready in time :-)
on the work front, boss played poker with some of his clients and realized that there were many many issues, most critical of which is the appearance of table freezing. when this item was first assigned to me, I could envisage only one aspect, that of freeze due to delay in proxy move. but even when it was fixed, table freezing kept coming up leading to all round frustration. I fixed another issue and suddenly there was an improvement. users could play for 20 odd minutes when suddenly the whole app would just freeze. From server to client, from one layer to another, it was fruitless so much so that I started despairing as to how could this issue be even fixed or was it one of those problems that one can never fix. There was one such issue at motorola which no one could fix. And then i stumbled upon it. just like that. I was of the opinion that due to n/w issues packets were not reaching client so it would freeze. But then I read somewhere that windows socket layer has a special problem. if the socket buffer is not emptied, sockcore won't send indication to the application to read further data. So if there was something unread in the buffer, the whole application would just freeze. All the time data was queuing up in the underlying buffer, but the application was unable to lay its hands on it :-)
And so another fix followed which dramatically improved performance. For 2 days consecutively, i have seen the application run for close to 4 hours at a stretch. It is only when the n/w conditions become buggy that the app starts to freeze and unfreeze. If the client doesn't receive packes for 90 seconds, it closes down gracefully. VS was able to play close to 150 hands over 1 hour with 2 of the actual players which is simply great !!!!!!!!!!!!
Well the issues never end, do they? there are still a lot of issues to be fixed but I guess this performance improvement would be considered an equal achievement as that of making tournaments run on Rounders network.