intfiction.org

Can't speak for Australia as a whole, but here in WA ap-west is definitely more responsive than ap-east. ap-west has about a second of lag, ap-east more like 2 seconds.

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Emily Boegheim

NA-East was fastest for me. Unexpectedly, EU-West was nearly as fast (hard to tell the difference) whereas NA-West was a bit noticeably laggy. But AP-East was *very* laggy and AP-West was the worst of all. (I only tested NA-East and NA-West once each.)

P.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! I plan to wind down the infrastructure over the weekend; I'll bring the servers back up once the IFDB bits are in place.



Great data point, thanks! I wasn't aware of the 4x multiplier. That certainly explains why it's so sensitive to latency.

Europe would really benefit from a more centrally located server. I have this running through Amazon's AWS infrastructure and unfortunately their only EU endpoint is in Ireland.



That experience was the motivation for this project. Given the latency factor it's better to have a lot of local servers rather than one or two central ones. But it's also important to have a single URL that authors can use to publish their content. tads.io is meant to address both concerns.

It's distinct from IFDB because not everyone will want the game's IFDB page to be the jumping off point for new players. The tads.io game servers will be linked into the IFDB network, and players that come via IFDB will be able to take advantage of the session-sharing and file storage features, but it's entirely optional.



1 second is more or less my standard for acceptable performance. Ideally it would be under 250 ms but that's a hard target to hit without more edge servers.

I get near-local speeds from Seattle to the data center in Oregon, around 250 miles away (400 km). A rough guideline is that you see about 1s of UI lag for every 1000 miles between you and the server. (Like any good rule of thumb, this ignores virtually every technical factor involved.)



Thanks! My guess is that EA would split the difference, so I'll probably go with Singapore until AWS adds an Australian data center.



That is really surprising and interesting. I wonder how far west into Canada that holds true? Given equal latency, it would be better to divert the traffic to EU-West for load-balancing reasons.

Since it's that surprising I redid the first three just to be sure. This time, EU-West and NA-West felt about equivalent -- about a 1 second delay in either case. NA-East was the clear winner this time around -- the lag felt more like a half-second. NA-East is probably the only one I would not find too frustrating.

Great, thanks! That's good to know.

After spending a few days tuning performance, I'm much more comfortable with the server speed now. Average response times from my nearest server have gone from 250ms to 25ms; even with the 4x multiplier it still feels quite fast.

Please give Return to Ditch Day another try.

If you were secretly dismayed by the performance before, you should find it to be far more responsive now.

From Boston, I get responses after a long second. (Maybe over 1; definitely less than two.)

However, I should say --

I'm able to run this game in Chrome, but not in explorer. Explorer gives me no cursor, nor does clicking start the game have any effect.

Conrad.

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http://tiltedcandle.wordpress.com

I checked and noticed the same thing at first, though it seems to have gotten itself unstuck now.

A full second between turns is definitely on the long side. Can you try again and see if the results are any better?

Nice work Ben, this is much better than before. For standard commands it's indistinguishable from desktop play, feels great.

I get a full second turn-around; generally less than two (although the first move *did* take 2-3).

Doesn't feel like a terrible outcome to me. I feel it plays smooth enough.

Still not getting anything with Explorer, though.


Conrad.

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http://tiltedcandle.wordpress.com