I need to implement a draft application for a fantasy sports website. Each users will have 1m30 to choose a player on its team and if that time has elapsed it will be selected automatically. Our planned implementation will use Juggernaut to push the turn changes to each user participating in the draft. But I’m still not sure about how to handle latency.
The main issue here is if a user got a higher latency than the others, he will receive the turn changes a little bit later and his timer won’t be synchronized. Say someone receive a turn change after choosing a player himself while on his side he think he still got 2 seconds left, how can we handle that case? Is it better to try to measure each user latency and adjust the client-side timer to minimize that issue? If so, how could we implement that?
This is a tricky issue, but there are some good solutions out there. Look into what time.gov does, and how it does it; essentially, as I understand it, they use Java to perform multiple repeated requests to the server, to attempt to get an idea of the latency involved in the communication, then they generate a measure of latency that they use to skew the returned time data. You could use the same process for your application, with even more accuracy; keeping track of what the latency is and how it varies over time lets you make some statistical inferences about how reliable your latency numbers are, etc. It can be a bit complex, but it can definitely allow you to smooth out your performance. My understanding is that this is what most MMOs do as well, to manage lag.