"PLACING" was kept for 4 minutes

Question

Hello

Yesterday something interesting in GameLift happened to me. Enough players were in a matchmaking queue and they were matched by FlexMatch because of ticket status but they waited for 4 minutes to join a lobby in a dedicated server although I assume they were in "PLACING" status. Unfortunately, I'm sure that one of players was in "PLACING" because I found the ticket status from a client log that I created but I couldn't find the ticket status of the others.

Could you tell me why the player waited for 4 minutes to join a lobby?

In addition, A scalable policy was turned on. That's why instances on a fleet were enough.

These are the player's information
PlayerSessionId : psess-be6a80cd-51e6-431e-989a-c4a6ad947c86
MatchmakingTicketId : 5f74bd8137901077501eaedb-17-17-54-1
TicketStatus : PLACING for 4 minutes
The time when the status of the ticket was changed to PLACING : 09/30/2020 17:17(UTC) 09/30/2020 10:17 AM(PST)

Answer

I've asked the service team to take a look. If you have technical support on your AWS account and this is urgent, I would suggest opening an issue there for a faster response.

While we wait for the service team, you could check:
* What your matchmaking timeouts are
* If you had actual spare capacity on your fleet, did you have an idle processes at the time which could have taken the game session. If GameLift had to bring up a new instance then that takes minutes. 
    * Look at how you are managing spare capacity, if its exhausted (because your incoming match rate spiked  dramatically) then players will be left waiting for new instances.
* Check your fleet for server instabilities, if your servers start receiving new game sessions and then fail, the match may be left in limbo for a while waiting for the server to be marked as unhealthy so it can be replaced.

Answer

Hi!

To further help debug your issue, which region was the queue placing this ticket in and what was the name of that queue?

Thanks!

Answer

Region : Oregon(us-west-2)
The name of that queue : THEEND-42258-Shp-PlayTest-Guaranteed

Thanks you

Answer

Hi there,

At the beginning, the fleet had 1 instance and there are matches formed and submitted to this queue THEEND-42283-Shp-PlayTest-Guaranteed. So the queueDepth metric was high and waitTime metric of this queue is 249 seconds. The scaling policy needs some time to react and the fleet was set to 3 instance at 2020-09-30 17:23:03, which is after this ticket has been in PLACING for 4 minutes. You can check the queue metrics in CloudWatch to see the details.

Best regards

"PLACING" was kept for 4 minutes

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