Hello!
I just finished my first session with my players on Foundry VTT hosted by The Forge and for the most part everything went pretty smoothly! However, my players would keep disconnecting from the game frequently throughout the session. Some said their page would just freeze while others said they received an error code first then it would freeze. Either way, refreshed the page seemed to fix the problem for a little while but they eventually would disconnect/have to refresh throughout our 4 hour session.
I’m not quite sure what the issue could be, the disconnections didn’t seem to tie into what was going on in the game. People disconnected when we were in a dungeon with a bunch of effects going on but they also disconnected when it was just a picture in the background and no effects on the screen. So I have no idea what the issue could be. If it helps, 3 of the players (including myself) are on the west coast and 1 player is in Hawaii. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
You should first test the game without any modules and see how it feels for a while. There have been modules with memory leaks which can cause the behavior you’re describing.
Since that’s the most likely culprit, I won’t speculate on other reasons, but as nobody else seems to have had issues, I’d say it’s a fairly sure bet that it’s a module.
Interesting, is there any modules in particular that might be causing the problem? I’d hate to have to turn off all the modules because I quite enjoy most of them.
I know that there was a compendium browser module that was leaking memory, I don’t know if that ever got fixed. Dice So Nice is rather heavy on the GPU as well, and some people reported lags because of it (which ended up causing disconnects like you described), so if your players have non-beefy graphics cards, you may not want to use that module. I’m sure there were another couple of modules that were sometimes problematic, but I can’t quite remember which.
You can use Shift-ESC on chrome to see the task manager and keep on eye on both the CPU and memory columns for both the Foundry tab and the “GPU Process” line.
You can start by disabling all, then you re-enable half of them and see how it affects the game, then either remove some or add some depending on whether or not the problem is there, until you find the culprit(s)
Thank you for your reply. The players did not seem to have any issues running the games while they were connected but i’ll begin the process of trying to find the culprit! Is it possible that a browser such as edge or Firefox would be better at handing the extra memory?
I hosted my first session on The Forge a few weeks ago using Zoom for video/audio. Some of my players were also having trouble loading a map, which was admittedly a bit complex. Reloading the page mostly didn’t help. Through some trial and error, they found that they had a much better experience if they were running the Zoom call on another device while leaving their laptops dedicated to running Foundry through the browser. I’ll try the Foundry video/audio next time to see if there’s an improvement.
Thanks. That’s a good point, something else running on the same machine that might be using up all of the CPU in such a way that it freezes up the browser for a few seconds might cause it to interpret the freeze as a disconnect as well. The fact that reloading the Foundry page seems to alleviate the problem would indicate the issue is most probably coming from the foundry page itself that makes it use more cpu/ram over time, but the cause could be elsewhere as well.
Let us know what you find and if you’re able to fix it.
Quick little update on my end, I asked a couple of players to switch to a different browser then the one they used for the last session (they switched from Chrome to Microsoft’s Edge). I had them run the game for about 4 hours while I would check in sporadically and not one of them got dropped from the game. I even moved them to maps that had more complex effects and ran some fake combat around them and they had no problems. I ran the same modules I ran the session we had the problems (although I did update a few of them) and it worked great. So for now I asked for all the players to switch off from Chrome to either Edge or Firefox for our next session. I’ll have another update to see if anything says after the session!