I joined Lemmy a few days ago under the lemmy.world instance and want to keep it as my main instance, but it’s being pretty laggy.

I don’t have access to a computer to ping each instance so am wondering if there’s a mobile way to do so.

  • Kinglink@lemmy.world
    31·
    1 year ago

    “Ping” shouldn’t affect lag, and your ping should be almost unnoticeable to you. Ping basically means the time a packet takes to the server.

    For anything other than a video game, you’re going to focus more on server load, and utilization. If something is overloaded (Lemmy in general is overloaded) it doesn’t matter what your ping is, the server can’t process as many requests as it gets and you see “Lag”.

    Part of the process right now is figuring out if Lemmy can keep up with the traffic, this is part of the growing pains of a new “social media” server. Best thing to do if it’s bothering you is give it a few days and hope they can work something out.

    • Eclipciz@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      I realize. I just wanted to make a new account with the lowest ping instance while the server is upgraded at lemmy.world

      • Kinglink@lemmy.world
        11·
        1 year ago

        The point I’m making is “ping doesn’t matter”. If you want to go to a different instance that’s fine, find one that seems responsive. You’re using the wrong terminology/thinking when deciding which instance you want to be on.

        • Eclipciz@lemmy.worldOP
          0·
          1 year ago

          It doesn’t? Something with 1000ms is going to be less responsive than 100ms geographically closer, though I don’t know how much it varies.

          I assume that me, being the the US, will have a significant enough high ping by being on an instance that’s hosting in Finland. I never used the wrong terminology, just was asking about how to find the lowest ping — I only said I was trying to find the lowest ping because lemmy.world’s servers are shutting the bed. I can see where the extrapolation comes from though, didn’t make it clear enough.

          • Kinglink@lemmy.world
            21·
            1 year ago

            Unless you’re clicking through pages at record speed, 1 second latency for a web page and 100ms will be almost unnoticeable.

            I just pulled Amazon.com, and on my computer it takes about 2 seconds for it to render, if we add 1 second of ping and it took 3 seconds to rend, I wouldn’t notice it. Looking inside chrome tools, I see it takes 700ms to download the content on the front page. This is relative of course and I could go deeper (if the initial page, and the content server both were 1 second away, technically it could take 2 seconds because it needs two round trips) but that’s kind of besides the point.

            The main issue on the web is content generation/download, it’s not the time to reach the server. Lag matters more in gaming because you’re constantly talking to the server in a round trip constantly, so any latency is increased and will be more problematic. but with HTTP, you’re sending a request and getting it back, it’s a single round trip, you then will take time to parse that data and read it, and then when you’re ready for more you’re doing another round trip.

            So if a server is 100ms or 1 second away you’re only paying that penalty once in a while. The issue is if the website gets under heavy load and can’t respond for multiple seconds or more, or fails to respond. That’s more of an issue with server load, which is why I say to focus on that.

            If you TRULY think this is an issue, go to your command line and run “ping lemmy.world” I get 189ms pings. Amazon gives me 79 ms pings. Google is 28 ms ping. Those levels will be unperceivable after you consider the rest of the time it takes to download and render a page.

            • tyfi@wirebase.org
              1·
              1 year ago

              The difference between 2s and 3s is actually quite large, in terms of peoples patience to stay on a website. There have been many studies on the effects of longer RTT for websites. The conclusion of most of these studies is that there are massive drop-offs in users (abandoned sessions) once you get into the 3, 4, 5s ranges.

  • tyfi@wirebase.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    There is unfortunately not a good tool to help with what you’re looking for.

    The best way is to browse to a few servers and see if they feel snappy. You can click through without an account.

    https://wirebase.org is ours, which is hosted in the US

    • qwop@programming.dev
      1·
      1 year ago

      My understanding (from limited knowledge) is that also due to how federation works even if you’re instance isn’t under too much load, you may notice issues with posts/comments from other instances if they’re struggling.

  • Cevilia (she/they/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    There are plenty of ping tools available. If you’re on Android, you might be interested in Termux (F-Droid, Play), that lets you have a Linux commandline right on your phone. I personally use Net Analyzer (Play) too but there are plenty out there.

  • hawkwind@lemmy.management
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’d like to see or make a tool that measures “federation” quality.

    Lots of servers are locally responsive, but lag or completely fail posting to remote servers or accepting remote requests.

    How can i participate in a conversation when half of the instances are hours behind or may not get my comments at all :(

    This seems to be a combination of software and load and it is very insidious because it doesn’t affect local functionality so admins that don’t care or check think their communities are just fine.