Understanding Transmission Delays

[rockin_rod]

I've been reading up on lag and latency to try to understand transmission delays, particularly on Chaturbate.
The degree of delay I often encounter is variable, but let's take an example of a 20 second delay, counted from when I send a tip, to when I hear the tip noise from the model's room.
I take it that the model sees the yellow tip message on her chat screen (and if using a toy, that is activated too) in roughly half that time - i.e. at ~10 seconds after I click send.
I'm assuming that, because the AV feed from the model's end has to travel back to me via the same way it reached her, so ~10 secs to reach her and another ~10 secs back to me.

So in this 20 second example, that means the audio and video feed on my screen actually happened approximately 10 seconds before I see it?

 

[blayze_noir]

Yeah... something like that. Earlier I was checking the feed for my show in another browser and a tip came in on my broadcaster view several seconds before it showed in the other browser watching anonymous.

 

[Lucid1]

I've been reading up on lag and latency to try to understand transmission delays, particularly on Chaturbate.
The degree of delay I often encounter is variable, but let's take an example of a 20 second delay, counted from when I send a tip, to when I hear the tip noise from the model's room.
I take it that the model sees the yellow tip message on her chat screen (and if using a toy, that is activated too) in roughly half that time - i.e. at ~10 seconds after I click send.
I'm assuming that, because the AV feed from the model's end has to travel back to me via the same way it reached her, so ~10 secs to reach her and another ~10 secs back to me.

So in this 20 second example, that means the audio and video feed on my screen actually happened approximately 10 seconds before I see it?

Lag is a function of not only latency, but by how much buffering is being done based on the quality of your connection. If you're having these issues on a regular basis, I would suggest you run a line quality check to see how many "hops"(the path) your connection is taking to the destination server. This will give you an indication of whether or not your connection is suffering from packet loss and/or extreme latency issues. The amount of buffering that is needed can affect this "delay" you are seeing/hearing, as the main video and audio feed occurs on a separate connection than the chat and tipping mechanisms. The camsite servers then struggle to sync it all together and you get these delays you are seeing/hearing.

 

[CheeseMoon]

[...] I would suggest you run a line quality check to see how many "hops"(the path) your connection is taking to the destination server.

Yep. If you have 15-20 hops from your computer to whatever cam site you're connected to and the model has the same number of hops, you will likely see a couple of seconds of visual lag for that alone. Add the buffering of the stream on the cam site's end to that, and 10 seconds difference between audio/video and the chat isn't so mysterious.

I don't know how StripChat's "ultra low latency" actually works, but I assume they just remove the buffering on the site's end altogether and serve you the raw data as a best effort. On the surface, when ultra low latency is on in your stream, everything that happens is most of the time practically instant and "lip synced".

In any case it looks like SC has a better deal with their Tier 1 ISP than CB has, or even that SC's Tier 1 ISP has better connections to the net as such than CB's Tier 1 ISP has. I'm just speculating though, but it wouldn't surprise me if CB also ran their networking department as a shit show.

 

[maskedsissyslutforyou]

You also need to consider the models encoder has latency before it uploads, up to the provider, and get though the encoder hardware, back to a distribution node, and then it gets passed through various endpoints/distribution nodes that serve users in various parts of the world. So if the model is on the other side of the world then there may be even more hops were one distribution node passed it to local to it users and the next distribution node closer to you, until it gets to your local distribution node and to you. The short answer is the delay seems to get higher the further the model is away, and if you use a distribution scheme, then the more users you have the more distribution nodes you have and the more hops, and the further away the more hops. And the number of distribution nodes changes based on load depending on how many total users their are and how many users their are in a given area. When an area starts getting disconnects and slowness it likely means that either they cannot get more distribution nodes in that area and/or they have hit the max limit they have have set.

For the most part CB/SC may not really have much of network team, as it is quite possible they don't own any part of the network outside of their own physical offices (if they really even have any). They will be renting cpu/network bandwidth from amazon/google and any number of other similar providers that provide these services. They won't have an agreement with any Tier 1 ISP they will be using whoever their provider(s) for CPU/networks agreement. Netflix has agreements because they are big enough to own their own infrastructure and network connections, but I doubt CB/SC operate at anywhere close to that scale. Even if they aren't running it on virt machines they will almost certainly be leasing/renting the bare metal hardware with network from others.

 

[Deleted member 1828]

Yeah... something like that. Earlier I was checking the feed for my show in another browser and a tip came in on my broadcaster view several seconds before it showed in the other browser watching anonymous.

Sorry my thumb hit the smile button thing

 

[rockin_rod]

Very informative replies, thank you! I was chatting about this to a buddy who games with people all around the world, but he lost me after the first sentence.
Makes sense that there would also be some buffering delay from the feed origin server. And of course me being in Australia and the model I most often visit being in Europe will add up.
Sometimes when my friend is online, she will ask me to check her feed quality on the other sites she works on, and there is typically several seconds difference in the feed between each site and CB - some are slightly ahead and some are slightly behind.

 

[bbbbadddd]

Whatever Strip does, they all should do. That's near real time other than in the rare case there's some issue. I'm not sure how they handle local buffering, but it's trivial and things still stream well. I tip, it's there. I see things happen about as quickly as it possibly could.

Cb sucks as far as that goes. Always way behind. Sometimes ridiculously so.