I definitely could be wrong, but I don't think the player with higher lag gets penalized.
I don't know, I'm just speculating, but I imagine the clocks for each player are managed locally. A player in their own client would get the transmission of the opponent's move along with a time remaining value from the opponent's clock. Then the player's own local clock would start counting down and when the player makes a move that move along with the time value from the local clock would be transmitted back to the opponent. That way lag actually does not come off either player's clock.
Lag is measure between the client and the server. So a player is never penalized for the lag of their opponent. However, both clocks will be updated to reflect the server official times, with the lag compensation accounted for, after when receiving moves.
https://support.chess.com/article/423-why-did-the-clock-times-suddenly-change-the-clocks-seem-broken
Thanks for the info.
Some games... which games?
Some games
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/111940a/comment/j8dnm9c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&c3
also mentioned somewhat here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/chess-com-relies-on-google-cloud-as-users-and-traffic-surges
Discusses some of the things that were being worked on earlier in the year with the heavier loads and as far as I know there's a lot still in progress. The Live chess scalability was what I am referring to.