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map.army Performance — Speed & Latency Guide

map.army is a browser-based application talking to backend services hosted in Europe. This page explains what affects its responsiveness and how to mitigate slowdowns.

Geographic latency

The application’s backend (MSS / MilX web services and the share-storage tier) runs from European data centres. Every UI action that hits the backend — opening a symbol gallery node, placing a symbol that needs server-side rendering, saving a share, loading a share — incurs a round-trip whose lower bound is the speed of light to Europe and back.

Approximate best-case round-trip floor by region:

User region	Best-case round trip
Central / Western Europe	< 50 ms — feels instant
Eastern Europe / UK	50 – 100 ms — still snappy
US East Coast	~120 ms — noticeable pause on rapid actions
US West Coast	~180 ms — visible delay on every server-bound action
Brazil / Africa	~250 ms — significant lag
East Asia / Oceania	300 ms+ — every server-bound action shows lag

The numbers above are physical lower bounds; actual latency on consumer ISPs is typically 1.5 – 3× higher.

Hint: VPNs do not help. Routing through a VPN almost always increases round-trip time by adding additional hops. For users far from Europe, the only real fix is a backend deployment closer to the user — see the FAQ entry on closed-network deployment.

Browser and device

Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Brave offer the best performance — their JavaScript engines and WebGL implementations are well-tuned for the heavy rendering map.army performs.
Safari works but tends to be 10 – 20 % slower on the symbol gallery; iPadOS Safari is fine for occasional use.
Mobile devices carry the JS-engine overhead of their constrained CPUs; complex layer collections (hundreds of symbols, multiple image overlays) may feel slow even on flagship phones.
Discrete GPU is helpful for 3D view; integrated graphics work but limit terrain detail.

Layer-size mitigations

If editing feels slow:

Hide layers you aren’t editing right now. The visibility toggle in the Layer Manager reduces redraw work.
Split large operations into multiple .milxlyz files — one per phase / per unit / per sector. Open only the file you currently need. See Layers → Export Overlays — Working with very large MilX layer collections.
Close the symbol gallery when you’re not actively placing symbols — it consumes its own redraw budget.
Drop image overlays that you’ve already used for tracing — they remain costly to render even when MilX layers sit on top.

Hosted-service availability

For service availability, planned-maintenance notice policy, and recommendations for users who depend on uninterrupted access, see the FAQ entry on monitoring and maintenance windows.