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  1. #1

    Working with huge player notes creates huge lags

    We have one player who started to write a diary/session notes. She is using one note to write all of this down.

    We sometimes already in the past had the issue, that some of her dice throws tend to lag, or get delayed like really, really bad. 10, 20, 30 seconds are not unusual. Sometimes even minutes. During combat this seemed to rectify it self after the first turn or so.
    In our last game we had this once again and due to a restart of my session as the GM, she seemed to have lost some lines in her note. That's when I started to look into it and saw basically every letter appearing slowly one after the other when she typed.

    After the game I was going through my and her logs to check if I might be able to spot anything of interest and then it hit me:
    This note is really long already... like ~70,000 characters long. And she is often typing and adding to the note during out of combat game play, but rarely in combat.

    I was able to reproduce this with another player (Cloud - Private), but not when I am connected from a second instance to my own game on the same machine:

    Typing in a very long note starts to bog down the connection and partially even the entire GM instance in very extreme cases. It took several minutes to transfer all changes to the note and all dice roles will also be queued until everything has been sent. We always wondered why her connection seemed so bad, but her husbands connection from the same network was fine. It was the note taking, which bogged it down.

    Are those notes always transferred as the entire text? After each typed character? When we played still in FG classic she did a similar note taking over another campaign and as far as I can remember this never happened.
    I guess as a workaround we might try to split her diary into multiple notes with "chapters" for each day or something like that... or just let her write until we see another delay building up.
    Last edited by Speculi; November 21st, 2022 at 22:37.

  2. #2
    Zacchaeus's Avatar
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    Just to confirm, is the note being typed into Fantasy Grounds or one note?

    If directly into FG then, yes, a monstrous story or note entry will probably slow things down. If into One Note then I’d guess that doing so eats up her bandwidth and thus would choke Fantasy Grounds.
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  3. #3
    I meant one single big note inside Fantasy Grounds. And yes, I can imagine several reasons why it could be slowing things down. But also some ideas how to implement it in a performant way which should not slow things down to literally delay actions by several minutes.

    I see how this could be confused with the OneNote application.

  4. #4
    LordEntrails's Avatar
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    I think, as you seem to already know, the solution is going to be to break it up into multiple notes. Not sure why this is happening, maybe some limitation of LUA or an architecture issue or.. but unless Moon et al can come up with a technical solution, you'll need to implement the work around.

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  5. #5
    Maybe there is a way to improve this. Maybe there could be the possibility to show some kind of network health stats like "Warning, this player is queuing too many messages." or whatever.
    I'm also fine in general with the answer: "The note is too big and will slow down everything when being edited."

    This situation might be rare, but maybe it could happen with other things as well. Having no clue why all interactions and rolls from one player seem to lag like crazy was no fun.
    I asked about this on Discord community support a while back and only got the usual "check your network, check for traffic filters" answers. So maybe this can help others or maybe someone from the actual dev team will have a look and can either give us better monitoring tools, or find a technical solution to fix those network traffic jams.

  6. #6
    LordEntrails's Avatar
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    So this did happen with long lists (NPCs, Items, etc), but since those were central to FGU, they were looked into and addressed. So I'm sure their is a solution (though it may be very different solution than the other ones), but of course, SW has to decide if solving this problem is worth the resources required.

    Hopefully it is something easy, but I just don't know.

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  7. #7
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    One reason this might be occurring is that Notes are designed to be Shareable and they share their changes in real time. The back end is not nearly as sophisticated as dedicated real time sharing apps like OneNote or GoogleDocs etc and this is probably going to be an issue with longer entries.

  8. #8
    So I've looked into this before for a different reason, and if I remember correctly the size of the note is definitely the issue, as when a shared note is altered, it has to resend the entire note to all the other clients that note is shared with, and not just the changes the file has undergone.

  9. #9
    I already advised my player to either split the notes into smaller chunks or perform the notetaking outside of FG for now. And so far we had no further issues with her dice rolls or other actions being delayed.
    Thanks for confirming my suspicions on what's going on there. I guess it won't be high on your priority list to look into further since it might be more of an edge case situation.

  10. #10
    Morenu's Avatar
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    you could try having them unshare the note during the session or while doing major additions to it and only share it when NOT adding to it
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