Issues during pilot session on Lioness server
Lou Schubert
Hello everyone,
I am writing to ask for advice regarding two issues I encountered today while piloting my study with colleagues on the Lioness experimental server.
First, when participants entered the study, I could not see all of them appear on the control panel. It took several attempts to resolve this, and the only solution that worked was having participants enter the study one by one. I was wondering whether this behavior is typical. Since I plan to recruit participants via Prolific, I won't be able to control the speed at which they enter the study when I run the real study, and multiple participants may arrive very close in time...
Second, the session overall ran very slowly. The game does involve many stages in which all eight players of a group must wait for each other, so some waiting time is expected. However, even when all participants had completed a stage, the transition to the next stage was often very slow.. I was wondering whether this might be related to the Lioness experimental server.
More generally, do experiments typically run faster once they are set up on a production server? Do you have any recommendations for reducing lag or improving performance?
Thank you very much for your help.
Best regards,
Lou Schubert
in...@lioness-lab.org
Hi Lou,
Usually the entering should not be a problem, and 10s or even 100s of participants should be able to enter your experiment each second.
One thing that slows things down a lot is the number of client (participant)-server interactions. For example, if a stage (e.g. the first one) has many record(), setValue() and getValue() commands, things can slow down quite a bit, as these requests are executed in order. For a smooth experience it often helps a lot if these interactions are minimized. This is often possible with slight recoding or saving fewer variables or saving the variables differently.
Slowdowns can be more severe on the development server (as many people may use this simultaneously), but most servers will slow down when it has to deal with many client requests at the same time.
Cheers, Lucas
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