The start of the 6:10AM PST Bambino Fondo yesterday was a bit of a disaster. My graphics card, which rarely drops below 57 fps, struggled at 24 fps. (And in case @Paul_Allen is reading, every rider was wearing the same kit!) From the starting pen to the first intersection, riders kept spontaneously popping into and out of existence around me. After the ride, Zwiftalizer showed a huge peak in network errors at the start of the event.
It seems that 1000+ riders in the same place at the same time is currently too much for the game to handle with aplomb.
IIRC, my Fondo group (C) had ~500 at the start which is not the largest group I have started with in the pens for an event. I did not see any issues. Mid-ride, I did see a guy ghost in and out, but I see a random rider do that on a regular basis. I would chalk that up to the ghost rider having network connectivity issues, not Zwift.
Did your Fondo group have 1000+ riders? You said Zwiftalizer showed a huge peak in network errors. That could easily have been your side, the internet in general, etc., and not necessarily a Zwift loading issue. Not saying Zwift is completely w/out fault here, but a 1000 riders is not that many.
From 2015 on Zwift has had its major glitches with big events. Rides with Jens or Andre come to mind from personal experience.
The experience is more robust now. I haven’t seen any massive breakdowns. A few times a year, perhaps, I see a few or many, but not all, of the riders around me flickering in and out for a short time, as Jim has described.
If I’m disconnected from Zwift, I understand I won’t see any other rider. If I see some riders but a number of others (90 for instance) are popping in and out, that’s not my connection. Best guess would be that somewhere in the Zwift servers/network something isn’t keeping up with something else. Zwift engineers might know but I’ve never read a Zwift comment on this experience.
There were 1700+ riders in my group. True, the network errors could have come from anywhere, but the timing does seem oddly coincidental if they weren’t the direct result of the event.
I agree. This isn’t that many riders. My downlink speed is ~180Mbps and ought to be enough to keep up.