We've made some major structural enhancements to improve Roll20's video and voice chat feature. In response to a recent increase of reports about the chat service failing to connect, we quadrupled the server capacity dedicated to hosting your chat connections and reduced the overall video processing strain to create faster and more reliable service for all users. Here's a more technical explanation of what we did and what it means for your games: Roll20's chat is powered by a technology called WebRTC. This allows Roll20 to create peer-to-peer connections between the players of a Roll20 game. These connections can fail for a wide variety of reasons such as firewalls, ISPs, and NAT settings. If we're not able to create a peer-to-peer connection, Roll20's last resort is to become a middleman and act as a bridge between the two players through a service called a TURN server. The technical issue Roll20 was facing was that our TURN server wasn't able to carry the load of all of our users during peak times. Most users were connecting peer-to-peer but those that weren't were falling back to using the TURN server, which was either overburdened or failing to respond. Some games would have no issues because everyone was able to connect peer-to-peer, while others wouldn't work at all or would only work for some of the players. To meet our users needs and keep integrated video and voice chat a free feature, we dropped the video but not audio quality of our WebRTC calls to reduce the load. In addition we redesigned our TURN architecture to make it scalable. At first we doubled and eventually quadrupled the load the TURN server can support. We'll be keeping an eye on the TURN server into the future and continue to scale it up as the number of users increases. We believe this will significantly improve the reliability of Roll20's video and voice chat, especially during peak times. Good luck this weekend and happy rolling!
