What is lag?

I'm Glenn Fiedler and welcome to Más Bandwidth, my new blog at the intersection of game network programming and scalable backend engineering.

You've spent years of your life working on a multiplayer game, then you launch, and your subreddit is full of complaints about lag. Should you just go and integrate a network accelerator like Network Next to fix it?

Lag doesn't always mean latency. These days players use "lag" to describe anything weird or unexpected. The player might just have had low framerate, whiffed an attack, or got hit when they thought they blocked.

Before considering a network accelerator for your multiplayer game, it's important to first exclude any causes of "lag" that have nothing to do with the network. A network accelerator can't fix these problems. That's up to you.

In this article I share a comprehensive list of things I've personally experienced masquerading as lag in production, and what you can do to fix them. I hope this helps you fix some cases of "lag" in your game!

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