“Peak Zwift” is one of many metrics used to track how active and large the Zwift community is, and traditionally it happens each year around mid-January. Usually on a Tuesday, around 11am Pacific time.
But 2020 threw us all a curve, and we set a new peak on April 5th of 34,940. That record has stood for almost 9 months, but was finally toppled today thanks to the first Tour de Zwift event!
The kickoff stage 1 event (9am Pacific time) had over 15,000 riders signed up, and at 9:36 Pacific one astute Zwifter (Sandra Thibault) snapped a Companion app screenshot showing the highest number we’ve seen since April: 37,569!
This is also the first time we’ve hit a new Peak Zwift on a Monday, as far as we can recall.
Zwift hasn’t confirmed peak numbers yet for today, so we don’t know the precise number. It’s quite possible we hit an even higher point today, and our money says it will go even higher in the coming weeks.
What will 2021’s Peak Zwift number be, and when will it happen? Comment below with your guess!
Awesome! Maybe now Zwift can spend some time on Zwift Power and help us racers out.
on this stage the results were shonw within 60minutes
Forget it. This is the perfect excuse for zwift to say that even though they are now a big company with huge investment pouring in they have to focus on game stability (they are big must their tech tea must be 4 or 5 employees only) and postpone any other development. In my case I’ve been trying rgt and I hope it kicks off as well because I’m tired of paying 180e/year to zwift to see no improvement whatsoever.
The app didn’t work at all well this evening, possibly due to the high number of participants. It totally messed up my workout and didn’t save either. Zwift needs more capacity… and with Lockdown 3.0, fast!!
Same thing happened to me. I finally got it to work, crossed the finish line for stage 1 and then it crashed and I didn’t get credit.
Crashing after crossing finish line seems to be standard procedure after this update. My mates and I experience this regularly after Jan. 21 update.
Shame the TdZ experience for a lot of people was so bad. Great to get peak numbers but if you cannot handle it it is meaningless.
It couldn’t handle it, no riders on bikes in TDZ after about 5000. Getting abou 1 frame per second. Had to quit the game
I recently built a new gaming PC and it has a RTX3080 NVIDIA card with a Gen 3 Ryzen processor. I put it in service last week and was averaging in the 170 FPS and maxing at 270 FPS even on Ultra / 4k. Today during the stage 1 it was only able to average 35 FPS. That gives you an idea how heavy the load was. I really think they are constrained by the legacy gaming platform they are on though. Not sure much will improve until that changes. A good interim fix though would be to offer the stages every hour to spread out the riders more.
I have a similar rig, slightly better GPU, but anyway, now of that helps Zwift performance in ‘busy’ events. Unfortunately, FPS is constrained by Internet location, the higher the ping time to Zwift server, the slower your FPS. You want a high FPS in ‘busy’ events, move to a Tier 1 ISP near the AWS node zwift uses.
none
It was the worst ride I ever tried to do. Haha. Everyone was struggling. After 30 minutes of riding, my display said I had been riding for 9 minutes. Eventually the system crashed out with me in 9700th place. I managed to rejoin in 600th but gave up shortly after. Zwift really need to apply a limit 35 minutes riding and watching bike parts, heads, helmets flying around or stuck in the road for 7km distance achieved
IMHO Stage 1 of TdZ has bene a flop.
A mess of bike without riders and riders without bike.
After 22 minutes of ride the dashboard reporter Just 12 minutes of It. I was pedaling with 10 minutes of latency!
Zwift isnt a free service and cannot play with out time.
Unfortunately having been a Zwift user since 2016, today was the worst it has ever been…not riders then we were crawling along 10mins elapsed time but only 2.30 on Zwift.
I crashed out as Zwift would not let me exit. I restarted twice before it let me join and find then front riders but by this time there was only 9km to ride…
This level of service is unacceptable from such a well supported platform.
I guess that $450 Million investment doesn’t go as far as they thought it would.
Exactly the same thing happened to me. Culdn’t agree more, totally unacceptable. Submitted complaint to zwift, no reaction received…
App needs some serious work, totally not fit for purpose, can’t go back without it closing down, can’t change gender on platform?
Afaik these days, gender is set when you sign up. Not sure why you’d need to change it.
Yes true, you can send a ‘one time change request’ to Zwift HQ, that’s it. We needed to do it recently as a brand account to join our new women-only events.
You can change it through https://my.zwift.com/profile/edit
5pm in the UK in a bank holiday. Ast the start of another lockdown. I gave up after 5 min and went to harass B Brevit instead
I quit my TdZ event today, the EST because of the poor quality of the feed. I rode for 20 minutes but it recorded every other minute or a total of 10 minutes. At 3.6 miles in 20+ minutes I decided to bail to a different ride at 12:30 PM EST. I think that limits should be set for these larger rides so we can have a good experience.
I did Tour de Zwift today and must admit it was greatly dissapointing experience. The reason most of us uses Zwift is real life experience which wasn’t quite the case in the race today. The positioning in the race was nowhere close to reality. My position changed randomly for no apparent reason. I was overtaking and was overtaken – it didn’t affect my position. I am not great rider so I started around position 4200ish out of 6700ish riders. All of sudden I went up to 2200ish place. Doesn’t make sense to participate in the race if you never know what is really happening. I think Zwift struggles to cope with the demand and became overblown, overpriced half cooked game.
Last but not least is the Zwift mess with user settings and several websites you need to be aware of in order to see what is happening. If you want to change the bike or clothing or check your achivements to ride new route you need to start new ride finish it change the settings exit and restart the app. Madness
These rides were set to “all riders visible” which meant the position displayed was your position out of everyone in every category. Which is silly as each category was riding on different worlds. This results in your position wildly fluctuating as the A cats might be going downhill in London while you’re going up hill in Watopia. Zwift should set this to “only riders in your group visible” and that will clean up the positions.
Rad I did the 7pm UK slot, I started in about the same place as you and finished at 2100 Postion, I thought it was the shorter lap riders finishing but with all the bad experiences I can see why my Postion improved some much. I was one of the lucky one that didn’t have an issue, I was using an ATV.
Looks like we did the same event then. I managed to finish and save on Strava. Zwift Power doesn’t seem to include the results.
I thought it was super cool how some people were riding with their warm-up trainers still attached to their bikes 🙂
Bad experience this morning on TDZ 1 too. Time lag, jerky and dashboard said I was going at 34kph, Companion said only 9kph. Also had to crash out as wouldn’t let me exit, but rejoined on iPad instead of laptop and other than joining at the front of the pack (having crashed out at 6109th place) seemed ok. I got the pass for finishing but it wasn’t much fun!
Perhaps with that many people paying for the service Zwift could spend some R&D money to update their 1980’s Nintendo graphics. This is 2021.
I wish 1980s graphics looked like this lol. Updated graphics would be nice though. It feels like it’s an early xbox360era engine
Time for 4 concurrent worlds? Paris cannot handle 3,000+ riders at once. I mean, it can barely handle 1,000 without it feeling too crowded.
Wow, sounds like a pretty near cluster there. Apparently, Zwift has made some changes in the last hour or so to clear this up: https://forums.zwift.com/t/tour-de-zwift-stage-1-glitchy/524996/69?u=mark_crane_tog_g_63y
Hope that helps since I’m scheduled for the TdZ tomorrow morning at 6am PST…
Oh come on now… “We didn’t anticipate the interest in today’s events”.. What an utter load of crap. They messed up and they know it. If this had been the first time a large event went like this, it’d be forgivable, but this happens time and time again. And please Zwift, don’t try to convince me you didn’t expect your self-proclaimed biggest Zwift event of the year (TdZ) to attract a lot of people….
I guess yesterday was my lucky day. Actually had a spot or 2 where I had to chase to get to the next group. (And it said there were 11,000+ of us.) I should have purchased a lottery ticket. LOL.
Totally agree. People were supposed to pre-register for the event so they were well aware of the interest.
I wasn’t on the tdz ride but was on a group ride during the peak. I was dropped from that ride with about 5 mins left. Have to guess it was related. Never happens.
What is Zwift doing with all that investment money? No updates to the UI and graphics. Makes you wonder.
Probably tryng to do more with less. Thats how VC works. Squeeze out as much profit as possible.
Thanks for posting my print screen 🙂
47,352
I’m done with large events. Been using Zwift over three years now and it is no more able to handle large events than it ever was.
I rode in the ‘A’ group of 11,600+ participants. No issues and had a pleasant ride at around 120th position.
I rode in the A group too and also had no issues. Rode a little further back at position 600-900.
I didn’t try TDZ yesterday. I rode an event on Tempus Fugit without problems and then went to Paris (around 7pm UK time) to cool down and it was a total mess: too many riders, really laggy. Eventually thought I wouldn’t be able to save the ride properly but after a few minutes it did.
I took part in the first stage, did the London loop with almost 7000 zwifters ou of 14000 participants for the event, no problem at all, quite unusual for Zwift.
Unfortunately it looks like they’re aiming for other less enjoyable peak metrics too, with ZwiftPower now up to nearly 100k ride files waiting to be processed!! 😬
I ended up quitting the TDZ. I’d moved 2 miles in 20 minutes with massive lag and poor performance from the Zwift servers. I lost my ride data and subsequent ride data. What are we paying for?
Why not cap the system of the servers can’t cope?
Did TDZ ride yesterday and had problems for circa 30 minutes. After that it went to normal in a few minutes.
The main thing I noticed is that it must be some issue mainly with the Zwift server(s) or connectivity. I run Zwift on Core i5-5200U which is a pretty slow cpu and its integrated gpu and during the first part of TDZ I was getting 0-2 fps not because of its low performance, but because of something else. The cpu load was about 40 % and gpu load was between 0 and 10 % during that time. After the game performance returned to normal the the cpu load was over 50 % and gpu load was near 100 % all the time. Seems to me like a design issue not directly connected to the HW users are running Zwift on.
I run a similar setup and regularly have Zwift freeze on me, according to the tech dept at Zwift they have a problem with integrated intel graphics. I have tried to ride the tour de zwift twice in the last couple of days and first time it stopped responding after 2 miles, today it lasted 10 miles. It seems it’s either time to give up on Zwift or spend large sums of money on a dedicated gaming computer.
I have never had any problems like that. As I said it was fine after some time, I guess when all the people sufficiently spread out over the track. I could try it on my gaming PC, which I don’t have hooked to a trainer, but for a simple test when I would just stay on the start it would ok I guess.
That record just got smashed…
39676 right now, 10:14 am PST Tuesday 1/5 (according to my companion app)
I saw 43,265 a few minutes ago. Gone down to 41.500 ATM but I think the peak might be slightly later in the evening.
could have given your friends a ‘ride on’ 😂
Hehe, I’d already done the first 100. That was after a refresh and I hadn’t pressed the button again yet. 😀
I’ve got a screenshot of 43,988 today at 10:05am PT!
43000+ today
Mr. Schlange said that it was even higher when riding with Coco today. But I got this screen shot.
46k+
48K
43,741 Zwifters yesterday
I Like IT to Ride with zwift Düring the Winter.