It's 2:29am right now, and questions of why I'm on the Island at this hour aside, I've noticed over the past two weeks that I run into quite a bit of lag when I play on late nights. It's nowhere near the Island's busiest hours, but things like timed combat are still rendered nearly useless, and pages just load too slowly for my impatient, obsessively-hotkeying habits. During particularly laggy times, the Enquirer doesn't load either, but YouTube pops up in a fraction of a second. I logged most of my page-gen times for the past few minutes and got this:

11.624s
0.454s
0.382s
0.928s
1.969s
0.429s
100.637s
1.698s
0.105s
0.096s
58.955s
0.287s
1.047s

Yes, 100 seconds. There are also times where the page obviously takes at least five or six seconds to load, but the page-gen time reads something like 0.243.

I'm fairly sure there's nothing wrong with my internet connection, and this happens over my mobile 4G connection too. I expect some lag during busy times, but I just think it's odd that it happens at relatively low-traffic hours. Am I just confused about why and when lag is supposed to happen?

Oh, the lag always happens at 10:00 am to 10:10 am GMT suddenly and tapers off the next ten minutes, and then at 12:00 pm to 12:10 pm GMT (two hours later), then raises ten minutes later, goes back to what it was the ten minutes after, and goes away completely at 12:30 pm GMT. If I recall correctly, it's necessary for maintenance or something. Just try to avoid it.


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About your other point: I was actually curious about this, and to test it, I just tried to reduce computer-based lag as much as possible. So I tried to list where can the page take a time to load:

One - My Internet connection. Both incoming and outgoing. This is something I can't control, so I just picked a time where my connection is as stable as possible.

Two - The time it takes to load the page the page's assets and show them on the screen after downloading/caching. For this, I got a portable browser with barely any extensions and add-ons(Greasemonkey, Java, and Flash), and put it on a RAMDisk, which is in my case three hundred times faster at loading than a regular hard disk drive. That will assure when pages are here, they're going to be shown almost immediately.

Three - The Improbable Island server Internet connection. This is also something I can't control, so I made sure I tested this at a time of low load where only a few players are around.

Four - Island Page Generation time. The thing we're looking for here. I went fighting a couple of Titans with a stopwatch and picked randomly out of a few hundred/thousand rounds. And every time I checked, page generation time didn't differ by more than one second than the listed generation time (I assume one second is enough to send the generated page to me and for my computer to show it after this optimization) which indicates that either your connection is having problems(which you deny, because you've tested it on both 4G and broadband), your computer not being able to load pages in time (which depends on your computer, but definitely takes a while on most cellphones) or you being too far away from the Island server. The Island server has GMT time, it appears. So if you're in America it should take a while to send your page even with the fastest connection.

There are certain things that the Island has to do, database backups, optimisation and so on. We do those things during the hours when the Island is at its least-busy.

Oh. Makes sense. Thank you, I just was wondering why it was doing what it was doing. (Reasons why I should sleep sometimes, I guess.)