I have a specific player who is lagging whenever we reach a lot of members.
He's my moderator, and whenever we get a lot of players in a lobby, his game becomes unplayable recently. He told me he lives in Ohio, so it's not a question of being overseas. Can you explain the various reasons that one player in particular might have latency every time?
5 Replies
Hi @Alix Ollivier. I'm kapa.ai, your friendly support bot. I will try to answer your question by searching through the knowledge base. :wave:
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There are several reasons why a specific player—like your moderator in Ohio—might experience high latency or lag when your lobby gets crowded, even if others do not:
1. Network Congestion and Bandwidth: As the number of players increases, the amount of data each client must send and receive grows rapidly (O(n²) scaling). If your moderator's network connection is less robust, it may struggle to keep up with the increased bandwidth demands, leading to lag. Even a good geographic location can't compensate for a poor or congested local network connection or ISP throttling How room servers scale.
2. Client-Side Performance: If the moderator's device (PC/VR headset) is underpowered or running background processes, it may not be able to process the increased data and rendering load as the room fills up. This can cause local lag, independent of server or network issues.
3. Server Configuration: If the room server is not sized appropriately for the number of players (e.g., using a "Small" server for a large group), all clients may experience lag, but those with weaker connections or devices will be affected first and most severely. Upgrading to a larger room server can help Room server configurations.
4. Congestion Control and WebRTC Fallbacks: Normcore uses WebRTC, which implements congestion control and can fall back to TCP if UDP is blocked or unreliable. If your moderator's network blocks UDP or has high packet loss, WebRTC may fall back to TCP, which is less ideal for real-time data and can introduce additional latency WebRTC implements congestion control.
5. Firewall or Network Restrictions: Corporate or home firewalls, or restrictive NATs, can interfere with the optimal flow of traffic, especially as the number of connections increases. This can disproportionately affect some users depending on their local network setup Firewalls + Corporate Networks.
6. Server Placement: While Ohio is centrally located, if the server region selected is not optimal (e.g., due to auto-selection issues or manual override), latency can increase. Normcore tries to pick the lowest-latency region, but local network issues can still dominate Server Placement.
In summary: The most likely causes are local network issues, client performance, or suboptimal server configuration for your player count. It’s worth checking the moderator’s network quality (wired vs. wireless, ISP, background usage), ensuring the room server is sized for your group, and confirming that UDP traffic is not being blocked or throttled on their network.
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<@185325614775926784> Kapa.ai is still learning and improving, please let me know how I did by reacting below.
The room server is at its vCPU limit, which is going to introduce jitter. Clients with internet that’s already jittery are going to be affected the most
Normcore can smooth out a good amount of jitter but there’s a limit
What's the best way for me to combat this? Limit the number of players in a room or something?
for now that’s the best approach. soon we’ll be launching this API to everyone which will solve it too: https://docs.normcore.io/room/room-server-options
Room Server Options | Normcore Documenation
This API is currently in private beta. If you would like to try it out, shoot us an email to help@normalvr.com with info about your project.