Will the timing even work?

We had to decide early on that we would need multiple servers to control all the various components of the game simulatenously. A single PC would do the synchronization and graphics. But, a game that is slow to respond to human inputs is a very bad game.

We ran a quick experiment to see how quickly the main PC can send a message to a server and back.

We had only two servers available to us so we decided to simulate some worst case scenarios. We sent huge messages back and forth, alternating between the two servers.

This was interesting. The average time between sending a message from PC to Server back to PC was 17.3 milliseconds! That is really fast! But there were some outliers. We were using an Ethernet switch to connect the two servers together. Potentially, the switch was slow to respond in some events. But maybe that's okay!

<2% of the communication times were in that weird outlier region. And the max was only 92 milliseconds. Humans react to auditory stimulus on average in 140-160 ms. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4456887/]

I think for the purposes of our project, this is completely sufficient! Whew! It had me concerned for a bit.