Twitch Plays Pokemon, the interactive playthrough that saw as many as 100,000 concurrent viewers during its peak, is effectively breaking parts of Twitch – specifically its chat system.
“The unique nature and huge chat participation in the TwitchPlaysPokemon experiment has put enormous (and unforeseen) stress on our chat system”, Twitch revealed through a blog post.
To handle the enormous load, Twitch first moved the Twitch Plays Pokemon channel to a dedicated server, which is normally reserved for high-load large events like Dota 2 International, but that didn’t actually resolve the issue signalling towards a possible problem with the chat system itself.
“Our first adjustment on Sunday was to move the channel off of our general chat servers onto a dedicated event chat server, which we typically use for large events like The International and League Championship Series (LCS)”, said Twitch.
“This helped, but there were some fundamental issues with our chat infrastructure that required a review.”
Twitch has assured that it will continue to improve its chat system while Twitch Plays Pokemon is still live to ensure that the chat system can handle such loads in future.c
