Multi-second delay when selecting audio? - RESOLVED

Online Player Public Beta
#1

When I select any sound effect, I find that I’m waiting several seconds (3-4, in some cases) before I hear any sound coming out of my player. I was looking at using the online player instead of the standard fantasy one as 3PI isn’t supported on macOS, but that sort of latency when using a sound is way, way too much - I’ll likely completely miss the dramatic/comedic moment I wanted to use it for.

For reference, the latency reported on-screen for me is:

image

(Which is a bit on the high side - I’m assuming your servers are exclusively on the American West Coast?)

#2

The first time that you play a sample in Syrinscape Online you may experience a short lag as it stores that sample to your devices cache but this should only be on the first play.Once stored samples should play seamlessly with next to no delay at all.

Obviously some things to consider are the time of day and if it’s a weekend, which can make that first play slightly more laggy but again once stored you shouldn’t have an issue. We are also looking at increasing server size to further reduce that first experience. If the delays do seem to be an issue you can always click the little refresh symbol and jump to a quieter server

As for location, we are actually an Australian company :slight_smile:

#3

There’s still a noticeable delay, even when playing the same sound over and over again, ~600ms, while I would probably define “next to no delay” as under 100ms from clicking the button to the sound playing. Also, something I just noticed - the “circle” showing how long the audio has left to run lags significantly behind the audio itself. Here’s a video showing the behaviour I’m talking about: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_57ZzOA9TYDxcPLgxLPHD_PkkgXCY3n1/view?usp=sharing (Tested using Chrome 80.0).

Are your servers exclusively in Australia as well? Because that would certainly explain the behaviour I’m seeing! I regularly interact with friends in New Zealand (I live in Germany) and the latency is extremely noticeable, to the extent that many games are unplayable (have you ever tried to SSH to a server on the other side of the world? It’s an awful experience).

If you haven’t already (maybe I’m just unlucky!), adding servers in Europe would be very helpful!

1 Like
#4

@ipsi thanks for your feedback. Performance is very important to us and we are working our way through a range of measures to improve it.

Our servers are located in US West, and while we’d love to roll out local servers in other locations, we are not there just yet.

We are monitoring and steadily improving performance in several area. There are definitely a few more things we can do specifically to improve the processing time for play element requests. But I can’t promise when those changes might hit production.

However, until we get local servers in more locations, and even then if you have players in Europe and NZ, transmission latency may still be a significant factor.

2 Likes