Incredibly heavy lag Friday, June 5th, 2015

Just wanted to pass this down, as it has been happening on Friday evenings, but not just on Fridays. It's mildly to moderately disruptive with dice rolls being delayed for up to a one to two minutes with several disconnections occuring throughout the night.

That seems excessively long, even for a busy night. How often does this happen to you, and is it only tied to certain times? Can you try it during non-peak hours and see if you get the same results? Does this universally affect all players, or only some of them? You might want to try the debugging steps and see if this makes a difference: Can you please follow Steps 1-3 of our Solving Technical Issues wiki page, taking special care to temporarily disable all browser add-ons and extensions, temporarily pause your anti-virus, and try switching browsers (for Chrome/Firefox specific issues) to see if one of those components is causing the problem. If all of that fails, please follow Step 4 , including providing all of the necessary information, so that we can further assist you. You might try making a duplicate of that campaign and see if it happens in the copy? If it does, try clearing the chat log and see if that makes a difference.

Is there a way to see what the peak hours are? I had some serious dice rolling slowdowns Sunday the 31st. Obviously, it isn't happening all the time, but it is annoying when players are getting delays with dice rolling, or server disconnect messages. Is it time to add more shards? If I can find a less network congested day/time to play my games, I would be interested in trying to do so.

I believe Riley has stated in the past that Friday night, Saturday night, and all day Sunday are the highest usage times.

I would also add that periods when school is out (summer, festive period etc) will likely add to the traffic on any given day as will common national holidays. Basically think to yourself 'will a lot of people have free time in my timezone at this point in time?', if the answer is yes then i would consider that a peak time :)

Another Sunday game (6/07 @ approx. 14:15 hrs Eastern) = more server disconnects and dice lag. Just sayin. It feels to me that it is very consistently happening on my Sunday games in particular.

It happened again today, Sunday 12:00pm EST. The table kept disconnecting for me, other players, and the GM. Eventually a couple of us tried to reload the table and it was stuck on the black loading screen for five minutes before we managed to log back in. At one point, after attempting refreshing the tab, it refused to load at all (staying on black loading screen for 5 minutes). This also occurred with the GM. I would note that this issue wasn't happening late May, and before that disconnections and slowdowns were very rare with the table being used, on average, 3 times a week in four hour stints.

I'm just curious, but is there a way to know what shard I am on during play? Or to change shards?

That is a great question Quintas. I saw connectivity issue on the shards but I had no reference to which one I was on

I guess what I mean to say is, "what can I do about it?" I'm all for looking at the status page to see if a few shards are down, but it doesn't tell me what I really need to know, which is, "can I play my game, or not?" I wish I had enough detail to determine something so I don't keep people waiting if the shard doesn't improve. Who addresses bad shards, and why aren't they doing a better job at keeping them running? Are I on the cheap shards or something? It always feel like my shard is having hiccups. It is a huge turn-off to see that red-boxed error message during a game. If it helps, I would much rather see a scheduled down-time once in a while, rather than have random interruptions during play.

There's not much you can actively do about an issue with a shard. We're in continual contact with our hosting company Firebase when there are issues occurring with a shard, and they are fairly transparent about when they're doing emergency maintenance . As for what sort of priority we are to them, Roll20 was important enough that they mentioned our business during Google I/O last week which speaks highly of our relationship. We're gamers here ourselves, and we know that ten minutes of crap service when you've got your party gathered is not acceptable-- it's something we take seriously, and our hosting service does as well.