Inaccurate timer

[underhau...@gmail.com]

Hi,

Have someone else experience that the timer is inaccurate?

When I set a countdown of 5 minutes on my phone and compare it with the timer in the lobby, the timer in the lobby has 2 minutes left when my phone has done counting.

Cheers,

Martin

[Marcus Giamattei]

Hej Martin,

just doublechecked, but could not reproduce your error. Any special browser or something like that? Best

[underhau...@gmail.com]

Hi again,

I know this sounds weird, but this is how I can reproduce the mistake: 

If you are in the lobby waiting, and then change to another tab to something else while the "clock is ticking", it seems like the timer is counting slower, and I have no idea why. I just took the time while waiting in the lobby, and remain in the lobby tab the whole time, and then the timer is quite accurate. But then I chose to wait for two more minutes and change tab. Set my mobile countdown at 2 minutes, and when it was done, the lobby timer still had 1 minute and 43 seconds left, so it had just counted 17 seconds..

[Lucas Molleman - LIONESS Lab Development Team]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for this. In some browsers JavaScript (which controls this timer) is 'throttled' when a tab is not in focus. That would mean that the clock can indeed stop after a while. 

Note that this would not generally affect participants' experience (as they would probably watch the experimental screen) - however, we cannot prevent anyone to switch tabs like this. We are currently working towards a solution by implementing a different version of this timer which is not dependent on the experiment tab being in focus while waiting. We will get back to you about this asap.

Lucas

[Tony Hua]

Hi Lucas,

Has this problem been resolved, or is there a work around? I seem to be having the same issue.

Tony

[in...@lioness-lab.org]

Dear Tony,

 

I believe it has: the current timers are programmed based on ‘web workers’ which should continue running when a page is in the background. Could you describe what is exactly the issue in your experiment?

 

Lucas

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[Tony Hua]

I have a set up where participants enter a lobby and wait for 4 minutes to be matched with another participant.  However, if a participant clicks onto a different tab, the lobby timer seems to pause after around 10 seconds. If a second participant joins, then they will be matched. Interestingly, the time out counter on the normal and quiz stages do not seem to be paused.