Lag Optimization Options

So my group has been steadily having more and more lag and a worse and worse time. Lately the site has become completely unplayable. The "Optimizing Roll 20 Performance" page is very little help, since it says we'll have issues when we have hundreds or thousands of journal entries, and we only have about 75, so I'm hoping someone can shed some light on some things we can do to improve performance. Some background on our situation. We have 5 players, each with about 2 or 3 characters each. We have about 40 or 50 journal entries I use for various spell effects and AOE templates configured to various sizes. I have a few recurring villains saved for the remainder odd number of slots. We use the Pathfinder community sheet I've deleted the remainder of our journal entries to try to pare down our footprint as much as possible but it hasn't helped at all. We play on small maps whenever possible, but even on small maps it can take a full minute just to modify a health bubble. What else can we do? What else affects this? We've got players with powerful machines that are still lagging hard to the point where they can't load into the game, on small maps with no lighting. Do I need to delete my saved maps? Do my players have too many items or spells on their sheets? Does anyone know what else affects this issue? Any help would be appreciated, thank you! Edit: Only API scripts being run are TimeTracker and TokenMod.

it can take a full minute just to modify a health bubble. Here's one thing that can cause this particular problem: Firefox, with "Autofill Adresses" enabled. If you are using Firefox, go to Preferences > Privacy and Security > Forms and Autofill, and please make sure that "Autofill Adresses" is unchecked.

Good advice on FF auto-fill.  Always try both FF and Chrome to see if either works better.  Each supported browser is updated often and their compatibility/performance with roll20 can change just as often...  Some extensions, like Lastpass pw manager have been known to cause issues in the past due to how they monitor input fields. Test running roll20 without any extensions. Also, make sure that if you have any spell casters that you try to limit the number of spells you keep on the sheet.  Each spell adds lots of attributes.  Best to just keep your favorites on-sheet, and drag/drop spells from the compendium as needed, then delete them from the sheet soon after.  These might not apply to your game, but 3d dice, dynamic lighting, animated images, music, etc. also may have an impact on the vtt. Hope this helps.

The third party tools that float around the discord communities cause major input lag with even just 5 character sheets visible in the journal and the combat tracker running.  My advice is disable them and learn to use the api system in roll20.  I have a session with 400 character sheets in a journal that are not even remotely laggy, though it takes a lil bit to load in for the first time after clearing my cache lol.  It sounds like you are using blank character sheets to give players tokens to place for spell measurements.  Make a rollable token and attach it to one sheet, or better yet use the spawndefaulttoken api and make a better one.  A very good source for learning how to make macros and use api scripts is to find Nick Olivo's youtube channel and subscribe to him cause that guy is what roll20 needs badly in the tech support department.  Hes very good at step by step explaining everything.   Finally, Transmogrifier man.  You gotta use the greatest pro feature you have available to you.  Keep your live play session as narrow as possible and store everything else in other sessions ready to pull in with the transmogrifier in a moments notice.  Its basically the character vault only for more stuff and instant without the need to log in and out of other sessions.  If you don't see the transmogrifier and you are a pro user...disable the third party extensions ;)

Autofill (and autocomplete) on FF are an old, old problem, but one which seems to have resurged lately.I thought it had been forever quashed, since I haven't seen reports for a long time. FWIW, the power of someone's hardware is usually the least likely culprit for lag, unless the hardware is seriously underpowered. (My Chromebook can run Roll20, but I wouldn't try to play on it, unless there were no alternative.) Much more likely are in-game issues, like those mentioned above, software conflicts like certain browser extensions or unsupported or out of date browsers, internet connectivity issues, or just overwhelming size of game. 75 journals should not be an issue, unless each one was simply leaded with spells. Handout journals are practically a non-issue for performance. To add to Vince's list above, I have found that SFX often add lag.

This is really helpful, thanks everyone. It makes me a little sad that having everyone's spells in the character sheet is apparently not viable. I suspect this is a big part of the problem. A lot of our characters have a lot of spells, 10-50 for some characters for the bigger culprits. I think personally the compendium fix isn't a viable workaround when we could just google and drop into discord. That just seems like a faster fix to me, personally, so the fact that the app doesn't support just... use in play is kind of bad. I mean, 50 spells is kind of typical for a mid-level character in this system. I will look into autofill, transmogrifier, firefox vs. chrome. Can I assume that if spells are causing issues that Item entries will cause similar issues? Should I limit the amount of item entries players have on their sheets? I don't really understand the part about the rollable tokens, but I can look up the Nick Olivo youtube thing. Are you saying my method of making the AOE template journal entries for spell effects is bad and non viable for play? Edit: What about maps? Should I delete all my maps? Looking into transmogrifer, it seems like it would be easy to delete all my maps and restore them if needed. Do they use up a lot of the app's processing power just sitting there? I don't have much prep time before session, but I'm going to try to delete all my extraneous characters but the ones active for the session and the autofill thing. Hopefully tonight's session goes a bit better. I'll delete maps if someone gets back to me on that in time. I'm just scared to let go of them, I think, I worked so hard on all 176 of them. xD

Bret R. said: It makes me a little sad that having everyone's spells in the character sheet is apparently not viable. I suspect this is a big part of the problem. A lot of our characters have a lot of spells, 10-50 for some characters for the bigger culprits. I think personally the compendium fix isn't a viable workaround when we could just google and drop into discord. That just seems like a faster fix to me, personally, so the fact that the app doesn't support just... use in play is kind of bad. I mean, 50 spells is kind of typical for a mid-level character in this system. Edit: What about maps? Should I delete all my maps? Looking into transmogrifer, it seems like it would be easy to delete all my maps and restore them if needed. Do they use up a lot of the app's processing power just sitting there? I don't have much prep time before session, but I'm going to try to delete all my extraneous characters but the ones active for the session and the autofill thing. Hopefully tonight's session goes a bit better. I'll delete maps if someone gets back to me on that in time. I'm just scared to let go of them, I think, I worked so hard on all 176 of them. xD Here is the thing with spells.  People tend to think of it as text, and it is true that text isn't that big of a deal.  If it was, then having a bunch of handouts would be a problem.  The issue is tied to the number of attributes the character sheet is tracking, and the amount of those attributes that interact with sheetworkers.  I haven't use the community pathfinder sheet, but if you add a piece of equipment, how many attributes does that spawn on the sheet?  Loading it up in a test game, it looks 8ish.  I don't see any readonly entries that would indicate a sheetworker interacts with equipment (though I expect one reads the weight of an entry).  Adding a spell looks like it spawns 20ish attributes per spell, with 2 of those needing to be filled in by sheetworker.  Any time something changes that would cause a change to Concentration or Save DC, sheetworkers are needing to rewrite those values in every spell. 50 spells is quite a few at mid level.  I don't expect many outside of divine casters will get access to that many unless they devote most of their wealth to spell acquisition (or they have been lucky with scrolls and spellbooks found). 176 maps is a lot.  I would recommend you create a map library game (or several if you want to sort them by season or setting), make sure your maps have good names attached so you can pick them out of a list as easily as possible, use the transmogrifier to move them to the library game, and then delete them in your active game. You might want to start with the maps and see if that affects everything else before culling spells.  If nothing else, spells that don't really need rolled in chat could be put in a spell list on the Bio & Info tab (or in a handout).  You could create each of the spell names as a link to the compendium entry (if there is one), or to a page on d20pfsrd or AoN.  Then if you did need to reference Comprehend Languages, you could do that pretty easily without needing to have it take up room on the sheet.

Try backing up your game (copy it) before you start cleaning. For all you know you're in the same boat as me and you'll still get lag as long as you're using a character sheet template even when you're using a brand new game on a  brand new install of chrome with the autofill turned off.

Attribute bloat plays a big part in a sheet's performance.  Spells can easily be dropped to a sheet, so player's may be more apt to include them in abundance... Spells also generate the most attribute data. One issue with the PF Community sheet is that it began 5-6 years ago before we had access to sheetworkers/javascript, the compendium, translations, drag and drop, etc.  Many features were added as roll20 rolled them out which has added a lot of extra code to keep things backward compatible while incorporating the latest shiny new features.

There is an API out there, not sure if its still maintained, I never jumped on it.  It swaps spell management to notes in the journal instead of a character sheet and supposedly that improved performance big time for late game casters.  I didn't like it cause it required alot of setup and I never host past level 15ish anyway.  

@Kraynic Yeah, I'm not a code expert, but I do get this concept. I just didn't expect it to be this bad. I thought that the site would be able to handle , well...using the sheet. I assumed (yeah, I know) that if a function existed, it would be usable. I admit, in hindsight, that was an error in logic since this is a community sheet and not an official roll20 sheet, but still, it's pretty disappointing to know that I have this sheet and that filling it out to even baseline capacity causes critical unuseability. Update: So I removed everything from the campaign except the 5 maps actively being used for the current scenario and  8 characters currently in play. We removed all the spells and most of the items from one of the PC sheets. I turned off the autofill thing and here were the results. 1) I'm able to move around the character sheet in question much better now (before I couldn't even access the sheet), so this is an improvement. Attempting to modify cells in the sheet still causes roll20 to crash. For example, if I go into any of the text boxes, I pretty much freeze up. At this point the character has about 40 feat entries, a dozen item entries, and 9 attack entries, down from maybe a hundred or so. This was the most egregious character we had. 2) No improvement whatsoever on the gameplay map. The map is admittedly fairly large, but there's not a ton I can do about that since I'm running a published module this time around. But there's also almost zero assets on the map except the map itself. Nothing on the map except the 5 PCs, 5 monsters, and few circles indicating spell effects. Oh, and the dynamic lighting. Will the lightning cause that much lag on the map? 3) No improvement on the health bubbles. I modified health bubbles and timed it a few times and it took between 90 and 120 seconds between clicking and finishing input for the health bubbles to finally work. Things I'm going to try next: Will try completely disabling lighting on the map to see if that will help with performance. Will try artificially altering the size of the map and player tokens to make the map smaller. We're also considering just not using the roll20 character sheets at all and hosting everything out of site because we don't know what else to do to deal with the lag because it's gotten so bad that we almost can't play. Any other thoughts. I will point out that I have these same issues on very small maps, So I'm convinced map size isn't the problem, though I'm certain it does aggravate some of the problems on this particular map. Most of my testing actually occurs on a 20x20 blank map with zero assets, I just forgot to swap over the other night because it was right after a session. Edit: Could there be some kind of hidden assets I need to worry about? Would starting a new campaign and transmogrifying the relevant important characters/maps over to the new campaign and typing out all my macros again be helpful?

Bret R. said: @Kraynic Yeah, I'm not a code expert, but I do get this concept. I just didn't expect it to be this bad. I thought that the site would be able to handle , well...using the sheet. I assumed (yeah, I know) that if a function existed, it would be usable. I admit, in hindsight, that was an error in logic since this is a community sheet and not an official roll20 sheet, but still, it's pretty disappointing to know that I have this sheet and that filling it out to even baseline capacity causes critical unuseability. I'm not sure this is a Roll20 problem, but something about how html works within a vtt.  I have seen similar advice (limiting spell entries) on Foundry discord support/system channels.  What you have ended up with sounds like it should be a fairly compact game.  On the current map, are you running explorer mode?  It might help to turn that off if it is currently running on a large map to cut down on some of the lighting calculations that need done.  Are you running the Roll20 video and/or audio?  You might try offloading that to another application if you are just to get it off the browser tab that is running the game and see if that helps. As far as the spell templates go, I have a bunch set up linked to individual sheets so they are easy to find by name and are sized correctly, and they don't seem to be causing me any problems.  But...  I am only running one Pathfinder game, using the by Roll20 sheet, and it is almost entirely my own creation so I have control of map sizes and such...  I have no idea of the relative "weight" between the 2 sheets, though I expect they are both pretty beefy for attribute generation and sheetworker madness.  I'm not sure what else to suggest.  One thing you might try (if you haven't already) is to copy the game and see if that makes a difference, since that will most likely put the copy on a different server shard (just in case that makes a difference).

Re: Bubble lag. If using Firefox, make sure you have turned off both autofill and autocomplete. Last time I had to do this, they were different settings. Both need to be off. Regarding new campaign. If you do go this route, I would strongly suggest using  Macro Character Sheet  rather than typing out macros. The link will explain the many advantages. In any case, it might be worth trying this route even without migrating all your automation, just to see if there is a performance change first. A couple of comments were made regarding removing extensions. Have you tried that? A quick and dirty test is to run in a private browsing window. That will eliminate most everything you have not explicitly given permission to run in a PBW.