Over the last few days, we’ve had Skritter slow down markedly every so often, and it looks like it’s due to Google App Engine being slow for long periods of time during the day. This is bad for practicing, since each stroke to be recognized needs to be processed by the server. So when we can, we’ll make the flash do the recognition to make practice faster in general, and especially when the servers are being sluggish. Also, the server status page shows an anomaly during these slow times, so Google seems to know about the problem and hopefully will fix it soon. You can see the current status of our servers at:
http://code.google.com/status/appengine/
Click the cell for ‘Serving’ and ‘Now’ and you can see when the latency is abnormally slow.