I ran the first session the other day on the server and everyone was complaining the game was laggy, including for myself, and we were having to refresh the screen regularly. I was wondering if is was going to be the same every Thursday or could it be some of the modules I run that could be a bit heavy.
If the server Forge servers are extremely busy on a thursday then fair enough but if the load isn’t too bad then I’ll start investigating the modules. Any ideas?
Do the Module Check and World Size Check.
That all smacks of Module problems first off.
Something else to check (AFTER those two), is the GPU being used by various users’ browsers: WebGL Report
Specifically look at the “Unmasked Renderer”
If it’s Intel UHD, know that FoundryVTT 0.8.x is REALLY hard on those, you’ll have to turn off graphics settings, and turn down FPS to stabilize (if that’s it).
I regularly have the same problem, and my game runs at the same time (thurs night 8pm onward GMT). I’m based in the UK, so have set mine to eu servers but one of my guys is in the states. It can take him 5 minutes to load the game and he regularly has to refresh as his screen doesn’t update. we know its not his pc or internet connection as he has a high specced pc and over 100mbs internet speed. Admittedly I have a few modules running and like to use animated maps but that shouldnt cause the lag we are regularly seeing (and its not jus his pc others in the uk see problems too just not as regularly. I was wondering if the forge limits the size of the virtual pcs it uses for hosting and if that is the issue (i.e. they are minimum specced, which may be fine for most games but not for heavy games) - does anyone know? If that was the case am I better off setting up my own cloud hosting solution and paying for a better virtual pc in azure or amazon (i.e. higher cores / ram)?.
That’s absolutely not the case, no, please see my post just above yours and run through all of those checks.
That’s great to know., I’d rather use the forge than setup my own instance as I like the bazaar and the setup of the assets folder. The reason I asked is I wasn’t sure if there was a limit and therefore would be better off with my own instance with a better vm, as it states on foundry that if you have lots of modules or resource intensive maps, I.e. animated ones, you should have more ram. I will be going through your list of suggestions as soon as I get home, so hopefully can shed some light on it. Thanks
There is of course a limit, every machine has a set amount of RAM and CPU cores. But the limits we set are far beyond what most games would ever need. Yes, you would need more RAM and a better GPU if you have resource intensive maps, but that’s on the client side, for your own PC, not the server itself.
Most Foundry instances will use 75MB to 150MB of RAM. We set our limit to about 4GB of RAM per Foundry instance to allow it plenty of room to peak to while loading the world itself (where it could grow to 2GB and more for a few seconds).
That being said. The peak usage times are generally around 8 to 9 PM GMT for European serves, and 8 to 9 PM EST for North American servers, but it’s mostly on Saturday and Sunday, and there shouldn’t be any effect on your games during those peak times. Making sure nobody notices is what our work is all about, and we’ve tweaked that extensively so it really makes no difference to users whether it’s a busy time or not.
After all, If the servers went bad/slow during peak time, then that would mean we’d have the highest number of users complaining and being affected by it 
Thanks for the detailed reply, really useful information. i’ll be looking at my worlds and modules when i get back from holiday, so hopefully fingers crossed can resolve the issues