The past two weeks we have been tracking an issue with increased latency in Roll20 that has been affecting a small subset of games. This lag manifests itself in several ways; the most prevalent being a delay between rolling dice and seeing the results, and things such as moving a piece and having it by delayed before it “moves” on other players’ screens.
At first we thought that this increased latency was being caused by QuantumRoll (our relatively-new dice engine), and we took steps to address this issue. However, we have now discovered that the underlying cause of this latency is more systemic in nature– we have run up against an unforeseen growth wall with our real-time sync provider, Firebase. This is requiring several major changes on our part.
Obviously increased latency makes your games less fun, and we want to make everyone aware that we’ve identified the issue and are actively working on it. We have already worked to eliminate overly suspenseful lag time between rolling your dice and seeing a result. We’re also taking several short-term steps this weekend in anticipation of peak gaming times on Friday and Saturday nights.
In the long-term we’ll be making several bigger behind-the-scenes changes to properly address the growth issues. We are committed to keeping play on Roll20 fast– we want your longest wait time to be a rulecheck by your GM, not your tabletop software moving a piece.
We’ll keep you updated here on the blog as we make these improvements and ensure we’re even better going forward.