Description of the problem: I have recently been piloting an experiment that involves larger video files (32 videos that are 30 seconds to 1 minute in length) and periodically encountering an issue with loading the resources before the experiment starts. Sometimes, the files load within 2 minutes or less, sometimes they take nearly 10 minutes, and sometimes the loading is so slow that I get an error message about being unable to download a particular file. My lab was trying various things and when we tried a VPN with an IP address set to the Netherlands, the files loaded very quickly, while 10 seconds before on our US-based IP address they were hardly loading. Is the Pavlovia server dependent on location? Is there anything I can do to increase consistency in loading my task? Thank you!
I’ve asked the dev team and this certainly shouldn’t be the case.
Please could you double-check that it wasn’t just random, or due to caching.
It would be important to clear the browser cache after each attempt, otherwise some of the videos might be available on the local machine, thereby giving the impression that the loading was super-fast.
Thanks so much for your response! Each attempt has been loaded in a new Chrome incognito window or the Edge browser with the cache cleared. We just tested again and are seeing similar behavior, with loading using the Netherlands IP happening ~3 times faster than with a US IP–it’s taking about 3 and a half minutes on NL, and 8-10 minutes (sometimes erroring out before finishing) on US. Speed stats for NL and US are attached.
That’s a very interesting result. I’ve changed the title of this thread to something more “attractive “. I’m hoping that we might be able to get some replication of this finding in other labs with other experiments.