chess.com connection speed favors U.S based players

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Mousetorturer
espinozaa hat geschrieben:

I am a US citizen living in europe I am lately all about bullet and but losing mostly on time. And I began to play most of moves as premoves but that doesn't change things a bit. I could make 2-3 moves in a second but the US flagged opponents can make it up to 7-9.

Is there anything I can do to improve connection? Would changing the flag to a european country make me connect to a faster server?

 

dunno what to do.

will stop playing bullet just bcoz of that.

 

Yeah, chess.com is incredibly laggy compared to lichess for us.

Gomer_Pyle

There seems to be some confusion between network connection speed and network lag. Your connection to your internet provider has next to nothing to do with network lag. Just because you can talk to your ISP at 100Mbs (or whatever) that doesn't mean your ISP is talking to the rest of the world that fast. Your ISP also has no control over how your signals get to chess.com and back. In fact, the way the WWW works is to split your communications into packets, as blueemu said, and send the packets by what it thinks is the fastest path. Routers automatically keep track of which paths are faster at any given moment and adjust traffic direction accordingly. During the time of your connection to chess.com your communications may take several different paths at once. Your PC has to wait for all the packets to arrive before it can act on the information. If any path hits a snag it affects all the packets because your PC waits for the slow ones to arrive.

I apologize if I lost people with any technospeak. I spent too many years living this stuff to know how to explain it properly to a layman.

Martin_Stahl
skipper_chess wrote

I'm from India and when i play from my laptop nearly no problem but when i play with my phone, it takes about 2-3 seconds for the move to register. As a result, i end up losing half my games on time. My internet speed is quite high (100mbps download speed) so this is either a problem with the server OR my phone.

 

Or, as mentioned in this topic, any of the connections your traffic takes to the site. If your phone and PC use the same connectivity, then it's probably the phone (or the wifi if your PC is wired).

Derek-C-Goodwin

I definately think hard wired is faster, I noticed a difference when I hard wired

 

FreePalestineTaken

Man i lose on time and they still have like 30sec left , i have good connection , im really fast on high speed dps mouse, i think i should stop playing againt US based player, i wish i can see which server we are connected at , and it will be nice if we can see our ping in ms like most of fps games.

Martin_Stahl
FreePalestineTaken wrote:

Man i lose on time and they still have like 30sec left , i have good connection , im really fast on high speed dps mouse, i think i should stop playing againt US based player, i wish i can see which server we are connected at , and it will be nice if we can see our ping in ms like most of fps games.

With some exceptions, live games' are being played through the site's primary server/data center in the US. The site is working towards a more distributed setup where players will connect to a server closer to them but that's only hosting a subset of games currently, as I understand it.

There are some things you can do to minimize connection issues and lag.

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8652402-how-can-i-optimize-my-online-chess-performance

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8584209-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues

Martin_Stahl
chesssblackbelt wrote:

This is a big reason why I prefer lichess. It's sooooo much faster.

They also allow all lag as far as I know.

David
I don’t play 1|0 bullet here anywhere nearly as much as I used to, not since one of the client side updates a few years ago, because the site just wasn’t responsive enough for me. Last year I upgraded to a fibre to the premises connection and a faster internet plan but it didn’t make any difference (not that I expected that it would) so I’ve just attributed it to my devices not having enough processing power to handle the client side processing fast enough (Surface 3 laptop with 8 Gb RAM). I still play the occasional 1|0 here via the Kingdom chess app but mostly play bullet and ultrabullet over on lichess instead
azzagbag

I've just dropped 100 points playing 1|0 bullet, largely due to timeouts and so I started premoving to see what that did. I lost some games due to unexpected opponent moves but I also noticed I lost two seconds after only 4 very fast pre-moves (e4,e5,Nf3,d6,d4,d7,dxe5). How can this be so? Even with a bad network, premoves should be instant assuming they make it to the server in time. This implies some RIDICULOUS latency of >300ms, doesn't it?

Can someone take a look and see if there is a bug where premoves are happening client-side on the phone app?

Martin_Stahl
azzagbag wrote:

I've just dropped 100 points playing 1|0 bullet, largely due to timeouts and so I started premoving to see what that did. I lost some games due to unexpected opponent moves but I also noticed I lost two seconds after only 4 very fast pre-moves (e4,e5,Nf3,d6,d4,d7,dxe5). How can this be so? Even with a bad network, premoves should be instant assuming they make it to the server in time. This implies some RIDICULOUS latency of >300ms, doesn't it?

Can someone take a look and see if there is a bug where premoves are happening client-side on the phone app?

Premoves take a minimum of 0.1 second and each gets sent to the server one at at time after your opponent's immediately proceeding move. They are not allowed sent to the server in advance.

If you're experiencing high lag, beyond what the site forgives over a series of moves, they can take longer.

DreamscapeHorizons

It's all a big conspiracy ain't it?

azzagbag
Martin_Stahl wrote:

Premoves take a minimum of 0.1 second and each gets sent to the server one at at time after your opponent's immediately proceeding move. They are not allowed sent to the server in advance.

Thanks. This answers a lot for me. 100ms isn't nearly sufficient though from Adelaide where my ISP is based. Adelaide to NYC is 257ms, Adelaide to SFO is 160ms. I guess I'll just have to avoid 1+0.

Martin_Stahl
azzagbag wrote:
Martin_Stahl wrote:

Premoves take a minimum of 0.1 second and each gets sent to the server one at at time after your opponent's immediately proceeding move. They are not allowed sent to the server in advance.

Thanks. This answers a lot for me. 100ms isn't nearly sufficient though from Adelaide where my ISP is based. Adelaide to NYC is 257ms, Adelaide to SFO is 160ms. I guess I'll just have to avoid 1+0.

The site is working on a more distributed server system and eventually all games will be running over that which should improve things for many members.