Hello, we are looking for help. We are developing a flash application in Facebook http://apps.facebook.com/farmvalley/play.php with the help of a software company based in China and, even though they have done a good job creating the game, we have encountered a problem that neither them, nor our server people seem to be able to fix.

Description of the problem:

As you can see in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y--c08sCODw the game slows down only between the 1st and 2nd click. After that, the game seems to have caught the server’s attention and it begins to work perfectly, with no delays between clicks.

However, if the user pauses activity for a little bit, then the delay between 1 and 2 click comes right back.

Server and traffic information:

The app started just a few weeks ago so it does not have much traffic, which does not seem to be the problem because the delay happen even right after restarting the server.

The server has 2 quad core, 2.0 GHz CPUs. 2 hard drives and 8 GB of RAM which is running under 30% usage. It’s running Windows OS, mySQL and apache.

Would it work better on a Linux OS?

Please let us know if we should provide any additional information, any help with this is truly appreciated

Without any idea what the problem is, it is impossible to say if moving the server over to Linux is going to help you any. The bug could be in the application itself, in which case no operating system or amount of processing power is going to fix it.

It is is really a latency issue, that the server is not responding fast enough, then maybe moving over to a suitably tuned Linux kernel would resolve the issue. But until you know that is the problem for a fact (and honestly, it seems a little unlikely), you don't want to make such a drastic move.