Resolved Shoutbox

[SmokeEmpress]

First, I want to say that I am liking the Shoutbox and the fact that I can make it a Popup. However, I have noticed that, sometimes, when I type in something and hit return, it'll briefly flash on there as part of the convo on my screen, but then it disappears. Is this normal? It makes it frustrating, because then I don't know if others can see...but that did prove to be resolved in that they can see it even when I can't. This is not something that I think needs to be 'red flagged', but it is something that I feel should be checked out whenever you have a chance!

Thanks!

 

[Aendri]

Just hit reload on the page. It just fails to properly load the message for your view sometimes.

 

[Wes]

I think this has to do with the way Star Army uses a distributed caching network. Remember your browser doesn't talk to Star Army directly, it talks to the Cloudflare server near your geographic location, and that can sometimes cause a slight lag when a dynamically generated page (e.g. one that always needs updating) is loaded. Here's what I think is happening:

• When you first post a message to the shoutbox, the appearance of the post is handled by AJAX. So it's just in your browser until the next update of the page with everyone's post.
  
• Every once in a while, especially when the chatbox page is frequently updating (many people chatting fast), you might load the chatroom page before it has been updated with your post. This causes your post to seem to disappear.
• It's likely that everyone can still see your post, even if you don't.
• If you refresh the window, your missing post should be visible again.

I'm not sure there is a way to solve this annoyance but I'll look into it.

 

[OsakanOne]

Its a flaw in the way Shoutbox actually works. It needs to be issued an update signal before it calls for unique postnumbers it doesn't already have, to store locally. In conventional chat, the update signal (affectionately called ping/pong (pong?ping!) based on call and response) is updated every few miliseconds. To conserve bandwidth and for massively multiuser chats, Shoutbox reduces the pong count significantly to a hard call ratio. It hurts the latency hugely but its an enormous saving in bandwidth and allows the chat to scale to exponentially larger sizes, with some shoutboxes (famously the forks used by Twitch.tv) scaling massively to thousands and tens of thousands of users properly, with the pong being updated and distributed on a peer-basis so other users pick up the slack.

In a nutshell, the more users we get, the faster it goes. The minimum dropoff is around 3 users. Around 7 or so, the number of users means if two or more are having bandwidth problems, sometimes the handshake (the exchange from OTHER users who already have the data, NOT the server) can fail and as a result the clientend throws a wobbly.

 

[SmokeEmpress]

Okay, thanks for the info guys! You all have been very helpful and enlightening. @Wes, please feel free to mark this resolved and lock if you feel the need!