HLO Lag on Sunday

[Jamz]

Since we only started using HLO for PF2, not sure if this is new because Pathfinder Playtest is increasing the load or has lag always been an issue for Starfinder?

Is Sunday a particularly busy load day? During the week updating my character here and there, it doesn't seem to be an issue, but last Sunday, with 6 of us playing, man, we were getting lags and timeouts, etc. It was getting kind of annoying... (an no, it wasn't my connection, tested other sites ok and I have 300/20 service and wireless AC1200 router)


I'd like to make one other request, the number 1 thing that annoyed me was I would press -Decrease HP, nothing, hit button again, nothing, hit it again, now I'm dead...

Could you PLEASE disable the button or 0 out the input or close the box or something client side then send the request?

Also, that HP/Resonance/Spell point bars are huge chucks of space. How about cutting that in half and adding some +/- buttons on either side? Maybe a [-1][-5]BAR[+1][+5] buttons? I'd rather click 5-5-1-1 to subtract 12 vs click bar, type 12, click increase, then click 24 and decrease because I just remembered I'm decreasing HP and not increasing HP damage (ok last part is me but god I did it a lot)

FYI Working on a Surface pro so clicking [5] button would be nicer (or a custom popup numpad) vs using the windows popup keyboard...


ANYway, back to lag, is this going to get better? Is anyone watching the server load? Do you have the ability to add instances/cpu on demand? Since we will be paying for server access, I'd like to be able to, um, access the server during game time....

/rant off

[flyteach]

Jamz, what time were you playing? I played for 6 hours straight, 10AM to 4PM Central time, and didn't have any lag. A couple of timouts due to inactivity easily fixed by a refresh of the page.
Flyteach

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by Jamz

I'd like to make one other request, the number 1 thing that annoyed me was I would press -Decrease HP, nothing, hit button again, nothing, hit it again, now I'm dead...

Months ago when my group was playing Starfinder my players had this exact issue. But fast forward to us playing Sunday (19th) from noon to 4am CST and this issue was gone.

I am surprised as I was just thinking "great" allot of the lag issues got fixed over the last few months as my game was on a break.

Based on speed and your in Chicago I assume you have Comcast correct? I use Metronet now as its full fiber in my neighborhood. I mention this because for a month I had major issues trying to play WoW and tracked the issue downstream to how Metronet was connecting to the WoW service. The issue was not actually Metronet or WoW but a middle server causing all my problems.

What I did to fix my issue was use a VPN service from my computer to get me past the "bad" servers. I found a free service called Windscribe that gives several gigs a month free (way more than HLO or WoW would use). You could sign up for that free service (pretty sure it even works on iPads/Droids) and see if using the VPN service fixes your issue. This would be good test as if all connections issues are gone with the VPN than the issue is more in Comcast and routing than LW area.

If you sign up for Windscribe use THIS link as it will give both of us an extra 2 gigs a month free.

Currently I just turn on the service when I play WoW and my pings drop from 65ms to 15ms as I bypass the bad servers in the middle.

Another good tool to use to try and track down issues is WinMTR (which is free). But it can do very nice logs of pings and trace routes to servers. Running that for awhile can tell you if the delay comes from LW or a server along the path.

[Jamz]

We started at 2pm CDT until about 9pm. Probably the worst 4pm-7pm.

Granted, 1 day isn't a great dataset and I admit it was a /rant. Glad to hear that your Starfinder experience has been good.

FYI I'm not on crapcast and never will be again lol, I'm lucky in that we have a choice in my town and so I have Wide Open West and they are leaps and bounds better than crapcast.

But thanks for think link/tip, I'll keep an eye on it and maybe set up a vpn to toggle on when we have an issue to see if it a man in the middle issue or not.

And honestly, most of the lag "frustration" could be mitigated with some client side 'tweaks', like, do you REALLY need a server response before updating the change in Hit Points?

[Mathias]

Changing hit points isn't always a simple transaction, so that is a case where we do need a server response - consider a raging barbarian - you need to look up how many temporary hp are left from rage, and subtract from those first. Also, it's not implemented yet, but I want HL to be able to detect if you go to 0 hp, and then set the dying condition to the correct value (or add it at the correct value if it's not on the character yet, or increase it if you take new damage while already at 0). We also need to have have HL's mechanisms ready to support games like Shadowrun, where damage creates wound penalties that get included in many other calculations, so in games like that, damage can't be happening just on the client side, or it can't recalculate the amount of wound penalties to apply.

[Farling]

Originally Posted by Mathias

Changing hit points isn't always a simple transaction, so that is a case where we do need a server response - consider a raging barbarian - you need to look up how many temporary hp are left from rage, and subtract from those first. Also, it's not implemented yet, but I want HL to be able to detect if you go to 0 hp, and then set the dying condition to the correct value (or add it at the correct value if it's not on the character yet, or increase it if you take new damage while already at 0). We also need to have have HL's mechanisms ready to support games like Shadowrun, where damage creates wound penalties that get included in many other calculations, so in games like that, damage can't be happening just on the client side, or it can't recalculate the amount of wound penalties to apply.

But can you disable the user input until the server has responded, so that multiple clicks aren't possible.

[rob]

We've gone through the performance monitoring data and looked at the server loads on Sunday. During the time period where @Jamz experienced "lags", we had one brief spike where we reached approximately 70% load. There were a few more brief "spikes" at significantly lower levels than that. Our average load hovered below 10% during the 7-hour span reported.

Based on the performance data, there should not have been a single perceptible "lag" due to server load issues, let alone recurring lags during that period. This data seems consistent with the experience reported above by @flyteach. for whom everything ran smoothly on Sunday.

I'm sure the lags experienced were real. However, they all originated from a single point, so it's quite possible - and highly probable based on our server performance data - that the lag was due to a completely different communications issue somewhere between the game location and our server.

[Jamz]

Thanks Rob for looking into that! If it happens again I will hotspot my phone and see if that makes a difference. I know it can be a pain to troubleshoot networking issues like this.

I'll have to remember to ping or do a trace and see what is up.