Constant Lag Spike

In every game I play, whenever the other player has under 5 seconds to move the clock will start to flash (indicating connection issues) resulting in me wasting 2-3 seconds on the clock from the lag spike. It only ever happens when the other player is close to timing out and I've lost hundreds of games due to this on all time controls.

No-one else seems to have this issue and I don't have this issue on other chess sites (where I'm 1700 bullet compared to 1000 here). I'm not really sure what the problem is. Bullet is unplayable for me.

As I said, it's only when they're within 5 seconds of timing out and it has never not happened. Any ideas what the problem is? I'm guessing it's because of my laptop rather than the site.

Looks like you were able to play 27 games today.

I guess the lag spike wasn't a problem today?

Came back home from uni so I can use a computer instead of my laptop. Rating went from 1000 to 1600 since my original post because of the switch.

I experience similar issues. There is often a CPU spike in Task Manager around the time of the increased lag, but this seems to be caused by the live.chess.com tab... If other processes are using CPU lag is much worse. I had a windows bug causing a background process to use about 10% CPU constantly. My rating dropped by 200 points, after fixing the problem it went up 200 points. The user experience is very heavily affected by other processes. It should be possible to code to minimise this. Sending and receiving chess-move packets and updating a board should not require many resources or be so highly sensitive to other loads... It would appear that other sites manage this better.

This happens to me too, but only occasionally. I've also had problems with the sound cutting out, my connection dropping (almost only during 1 min chess of course), and the weirdest: not being able to cancel a premove. The last two days I've gotten a message saying one of my opponents wasn't playing fair. Anyone know what that is about?

Connection dropping seems to be the extreme end of lag. It often happens when other tabs are working perfectly, so it is a timeout issue in the chess.com code rather than a real connection issue. There is a huge difference at the best of times between a /ping in the chess.com and pinging live2.chess.com in cmd.exe. The fair play message is likely to be unrelated.

Thanks. Any idea what the fair play message means? As in, how does one not abide by fair play?

Various things: using an engine (more likely at lower speeds than bullet), and abandoning games being the most common I think. If someone you played was found to have been using an engine and you lost against them you might get those points credited back, They may be caught because someone else flagged them or through random checks I think. Basically it gets spotted when someone's moves are "too perfect".

Thanks again. Like going to Lichess and using their analysis board?

I guess something like that, or having Stockfish running alongside.

I appreciate the info, thanks!