Speed/Lag/Latency Test

[brisdaz]

I'm in Australia which is half way across the world from the French servers. I was wondering if it's possible to tell the lag or latency or if it's faster in Europe.

I think there used to be a test that you could do if it was slow on BGA but I've lost it. Can anyone help?

[brisdaz]

Ok I found it - https://boardgamearena.com/troubleshoot?part_two

My latency is 250ms.

[Meeplelowda]

Ok I found it - https://boardgamearena.com/troubleshoot?part_two

My latency is 250ms.

Unless you're playing Spot It or some other simultaneous action game, minor latency variations are irrelevant.

[brisdaz]

I'm playing lost cities and the thinking time versus update time is roughly similar so the updating is slightly annoying for turn based games.

Perhaps because it's so low for you that you don't notice it. What's yours?

[Meeplelowda]

I'm playing lost cities and the thinking time versus update time is roughly similar so the updating is slightly annoying for turn based games.

Perhaps because it's so low for you that you don't notice it. What's yours?

I don't care what it is because it's irrelevant. I don't play Spot It anymore, and I'm not worried about a move taking a literal fraction of a second to be transmitted to or from the server. A latency of 250ms is a non-issue for turn-based games. I don't even know what you're talking about. You're telling me someone can take hours or days to make a move, and somehow a delay of 250ms is materially affecting the gameplay?

[brisdaz]

It is when you have 10 to 15 turn based games and it takes a bit to update the status. The 250ms maybe misleading as some of the numbers spike up to 1 or 2 seconds so I'm not sure how the troubleshooting page is calculating 250ms.

I'd be happy with it under 50ms or 100ms at the worst.

[Meeplelowda]

it takes a bit to update the status.

The amount of time it take to update, i.e., transfer all the data needed to display the new game state, is more about the data rate than latency. Yes, at a minimum it will take 250ms, but unless you're playing Spot It (or a first person shooter) it doesn't matter from a practical standpoint. You're not updating all of your turn-based games simultaneously. Whatever delay you're experiencing is only negligibly due to latency. You seem to be equating latency with the total time it takes to transmit data, not the delay in transmission (which it is). In other words, even if you had ZERO latency (a physical impossibility), there would still be a delay in updating because it's would take non-zero time to transfer all the data.

[BarnardsStar]

Also, if the page loads and says, “go get these JavaScript files” and those files get run and say “go get these other files”, and those other files say, “go get these images”, etc etc, then I can see how a latency of 250ms could mean the page takes several seconds to load. Eg if there are 20 round-trips in the course of loading a game, that could add 5 seconds to load time. (I don’t know how many round trips it takes to load typical games, but this doesn’t seem outlandish to me.

[JimBut]

Latency isn't necessary a good indicator of response times. Some things you could check:

• How fast does the home page load for you? If you open the browser console (F12) and check the network tab you should see how long it took to load the page

• Are there particular games this is an issue with?

• Any issues on a speed test site?

[brisdaz]

I stopwatched it and it takes 4 seconds in between games. With 10 to 20 games it feels longer, especially when most turn decisions can be done in a second or so.