I’ve been listening to my husband scramble to find a group of fellow racers to take part in iRacing’s virtual Rolex 24 at Daytona for months. I mean months. This man repaired his whole entire broken sim rig specifically for this race. And then the servers crashed.
The virtual Rolex 24 has attracted race fans across the globe interested in trying their hand at running a full-day endurance race with some of their closest sim racing pals. I’ve watched people sweat over their liveries for weeks to create the best possible car. There have been practice sessions lined up for this event to give people the time to practice. And if you’re as organized as my husband and his team, you’ve gathered a team of six drivers, accounted for all of their various schedules and preferences, and scheduled out driving time based on skill level and experience.
If you’re my husband and his team, you also spent upwards of five hours waiting for the server to open.
This morning’s race was scheduled to start at about 8 am ET. But when I went to talk to my husband a little before 10, everyone was still waiting around just to get in.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” my husband said. “The whole thing just imploded.”
If you’re not familiar with the way iRacing organizes its sim events, the service usually offers several different time slots for big, official events that count towards your license rank and your safety rating. When people log on to race, the service has to create multiple different race servers in order to accommodate for them. If 100 people register for a race, iRacing evaluates the safety ratings and licenses of the people who entered, then segments them off into different slots for the actual race. That way, you’ll have a standard, 30-ish car field where everyone will be on a relatively similar skill level.
For the Daytona 24, one time slot kicked off at 8pm ET on Friday, January 22. The second—the most popular event—was scheduled for 8am on Saturday.
As it turned out, there were so many sim racers—at least 15,000—who all attempted to log in at the same time for that time slot. An explanation as to the problem on the iRacing forums read as follows:
The scheduler had issues bringing new race servers online fast enough. Teams were waiting to be assigned to their practice servers after registering because there were no free slots. They then needed to wait for a new server to spin up and be ready to be assigned.
When the launch came for the session we didn’t receive any feedback from the scheduler. We could see that it was alive and scheduling other sessions.
Looking at the logs, we could see that the scheduler determined it was taking too long at one point and timed out.
Basically, the scheduler did the same thing your internet browser does when it takes way too long to load: it just times out. It’s too much all at once.
iRacing basically had to override that function, to demand that it populate different race servers no matter how long it took. And it took one hell of a long time. My husband and his crew got into a server just before 1pm ET, but there were still others waiting by that time.
It took hours for iRacing to rectify the problem, at which point it offered a $5 credit for every driver that had entered the race. As the iRacing crew noted, “this is only a small token for your time and frustration however we hope that it is an olive branch showing our dedication to improving these events moving forward.”
This has been a consistent problem with large endurance events on iRacing. Servers ran slow during the 9am ET time slot for Le Mans on June 20, 2020, and other sim racers reported to me similar lags when loading in for 2020’s Daytona 24 event, albeit to a lesser extent.
It’s understandable that there are issues with a rapidly growing service. Race fans desperate for a little motorsport action signed up to iRacing during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to get their speed fix, and even professional drivers are hitting the service to turn laps and have a good time. While iRacing may have thought it was prepared to handle an influx of 15,000 people all trying to enter the same server, shit happens. You can’t really know until you try.
What many sim racers find unacceptable, however, is the lack of communication. The first iRacing tweet acknowledging the issue came at 9:14 am ET, over an hour after people started really struggling—and even then, it was a fairly vague message.
“Our scheduler experienced a technical issue that we are currently evaluating. This timeslot of the Daytona 24h will NOT have a race start,” a tweet read. “We are evaluating our options to see if we can put up another one in the next hour or so. Stay tuned for more information.”
It took several further hours—and countless tweets demanding to know what happened—before iRacing noted what the problem was. Sim racers scheduled to compete spent most of that time troubleshooting to see if the problem was on their end or just sitting on their hands, speculating in group chats. Even worse, iRacing shut down its user forums so fans had one fewer place left to vent.
It’s a shitty situation for everyone involved, iRacing users and staff combined. But after today’s chaos, it’ll be worth iRacing’s time and money to figure out how to combat these problems in the future.
And if you’re looking for some goofballs to watch, you can watch my husband’s team in car No. 6 here or their sister team, No. 90, here.
Leave a Reply
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
