Troubleshooting Latency

My group and I have been plague, for nearly as long as i can remember, with latency issues - it is way worst than ever before, and I'm going crazy trying to play a game i'm supposed to be relaxing to.  Even with just 4 players, most nights latency gets so bad that you can't even use the mouse to effectively move tokens; you're forced to use the keyboard arrow keys, and each movement can take 1-2 seconds.  Moving 10 tokens a round is agony. How can I better start sniffing out what's causing latency? Is it players? Is it APIs? Is it the service?  Is it something to do with some characteristic of the campaign?  It's infuriating to think about. I do use APIs heavily, but they really aren't complicated scripts.  Mostly using TheAaron's stuff and few scripts i've wrote, that historically, didn't cause noticeable lag.   I have no scripts that are running "continuously" in the sense that they are actively listening or what not, so I don't think its an  API issue, but i'd love to track its effects on latency as they fire though. My campaigns aren't generally very large, and each page is only 1 map background, and then tokens - we're talking less than 15-20 tokens/images per page. Roll20 support gives me canned responses everytime about browsers, blah blah blah.  My browsers (and all those in my party) are all up to date, and we are all using gaming PCs.  It's not a client side issue, in my opinion.

Couple of things, first off try to treat your live session as just the stage of your adventure, don't hoard or store shit tons of unnecesssary stuff in it, use your transmogrifier to move things into it on demand.  I also recommend making a fresh session from scratch, don't copy the game, you likely will copy the problem.  You can also try hosting in the dev server if everyone in your group is in the US.  Lag will be nonexistant but if anyones outside the US they will experience lag.   Finally, this will piss off third party tools folks but....they induce input lag which most commonly looks  like graphic lag to most folks.  If you have the third party tools installed OR your players do, that is likely the actual culprit.  If you need them for anything, install it in the other browser you don't use, and only launch it with that browser on demand, try not to run a live session with those awful tools installed.  

Thanks Eddie, ill take a look at the third party stuff - i myself use little addons but ill see what the rest of the gang does. With respect to the library management, there's a wiki page somewhere with similar suggestions, my understanding is that it only impacted loading time - are you saying the transmogrify workaround (aka keep few journal items) impacts latency/lag in real time and NOT just the initial load time?  One of my campaign has less than a 100 monsters/sheets/players - is that considered a troublesome amount?

100 is well within normal campaign size, unless they all happen to be spellcasters with dozens of spell on them. And yes, while everything is loaded into memory upon launch, it can affect performance throughout the session. There's a lot more data to shift through and lookup during the session.

keithcurtis said:  everything is loaded into memory upon launch. Ah that is probably the culprit right there!! I didn't realize that "everything is loaded into memory" - i thought only the stuff that was "rendered" was being stored. I'll try the whole micro-manage journal entries and see if that clears things up. Thank you all!

Giger said: keithcurtis said:  everything is loaded into memory upon launch. Ah that is probably the culprit right there!! I didn't realize that "everything is loaded into memory" - i thought only the stuff that was "rendered" was being stored. I'll try the whole micro-manage journal entries and see if that clears things up. Thank you all! I have no way of confirming this but I also think that everyones computers have cached image files from the URL of the session, this is why its a good idea to clear the cache alot, sure you haven't run that gargantuan dungeon crawl map in 2 months but Jonny Main Character Syndrome hasn't cleared his cache since the 80's and has no clue his pc is storing that shit juuuuuust incase you load back to that page.  I think one of the neat perks of remaking from scratch is that you get a new URL and the game is not preloading a ton of things.