Recently I’ve been experiencing a huge problem while playing on the São Paulo servers: a long, significant lag spike that happens suddenly after playing for about 5-10 minutes, repeating at intervals of approximately 1 minute.
This has made many games unplayable due to the lag spike, as the game completely freezes for minutes, which is frustrating knowing that this is the only good server available in all of South America.
This error isn’t just happening to me, almost all players have experienced it. I’ve seen several posts here on the devforum, complaints from friends, videos complaining about it, and more.
This is the normal ping when there’s no lag spike:
Interesting… I’ve been having such intensified random ping spike issues across all Roblox servers for a very long time and I can’t tell what causes it and if it’s a local or a Roblox sided issue.
that’s strange, i also saw a guy who said that this happened on all servers, but for some reason it only happens to me on the sao paulo servers. there’s a chance it’s a bug in everything related to connecting to a server in south america or other continents
this has also been happening to me while playing, i never disconnect from the server or nothing its just a huge lag spike that lasts around 30-60 seconds
the problem is so bad I actually join servers from the US to avoid this issue entirely. Horrible execution with these new south american server roblox.
I can confirm the problem happens mainly in brazil’s servers, the ping spikes happen every few seconds and usually make it so you have to rejoin to fix them, ive tried every other server and it only seems to be happening on south american ones.
the worst part is that roblox said that the south american servers would be “the best of all” but in the end, you can’t even play for 5 minutes without experiencing numerous problems. A temporary solution I found for this problem is to use a vpn like cloudflare warp (a few days ago even that wasn’t working, but suddenly it started working) and wait until it’s resolved
Recently I discovered that this error seems to occur simultaneously on a server. For example, when I’m playing on the server and a lag spike starts, most of the players on the server who are from South America experience lag at the same time as me. Therefore, I have two hypotheses about the cause of the problem:
If the error is only on the Brazilian server, then it’s some internal problem with the server’s operation
If the error is really affecting all South Americans, then the error is in the network system that redirects network packets to the servers (I forgot the exact name for this). I have this hypothesis because when the Brazilian server was added, it was necessary to use a VPN to have a low ping, otherwise, you would have a very high ping
Although I couldn’t figure out much information about the issue, I did get several reports regarding this issue in our game
Every time the issue is brought up the server region is always São Paulo
The server just entirely stops receiving information from the client but the client can receive new information just fine, so they cannot do anything until they rejoin
I’m not sure if this is even the same issue as you guys mentioned a lag spike that goes away later but these seem to be just permanent from the reports I’ve gotten
That’s all I have so far but it is a really annoying issue and I hope it can get fixed in time
I decided to do some research and run some tests involving what you mentioned, and the lag spike, and I think I’ve discovered the reason, and yes, it must be related
The problem seems to be happening on the roblox edge that connects to the servers (basically, the edge is a mini intermediary server that makes the network packet reach the servers faster). The problem is that Roblox seems to have configured it incorrectly, or it’s very congested, causing the packet to enter a “queue” to reach the server, or sometimes it doesn’t even reach the server anymore
From what I’ve seen, it seems this will likely take a long time to fix because someone from Roblox would actually need to play on the servers to figure it out
(edit: just a reminder that I’m not absolutely certain about this, i’m just speculating that it’s the edge because if it were the server, the lag wouldn’t be happening to everyone at the same time)
That makes a lot of sense, and honestly, it explains exactly what’s been happening.
If it were just the game acting up, we’d see people lagging at different times or in different ways. But since it’s hitting everyone at the exact same moment, it has to be a problem with the “main entrance” to the servers here in Brazil.
It’s pretty frustrating to hear that it might take a while to fix just because they need to see it to believe it, but at least your tests show that it’s definitely on their end and not ours.
Hopefully, they get someone to actually look at the Brazil connection points soon so we can get back to playing normally, now I understand why they wanted to release the servers only in 2026.
This is VERY strange. In the first video, the client is still communicating with the server because you can receive and send messages in the chat. However, besides the cooldown being frozen, the amount of kB/s received is much lower than normal for ia, which is somewhere between 30 and 150 kB/s in a normal match. I don’t think it’s item asylum’s fault, but I have no idea what happened in that video
In the second video, it seems like it was a normal lag spike without much new to report
And about the lag spike only happening on item asylum, it must mean that roblox has more than one edge, where one or more of them are healthy, and one or more of them are bad, and you must have had the bad luck of connecting to one of the bad ones or other reason (again this is speculation). But it all depends on the region you live in, because for me, no matter what game I test, if I’m not using a vpn, I’ll suffer from lag spikes
My theory is actually tied to Game ID sharding. Roblox basically groups certain Game IDs into specific clusters at the regional gateway. If the specific cluster Item Asylum is on has a bad route or a broken load balancer in São Paulo, everyone on that game gets hit with the same lag spike while other games stay smooth.
That Custom Matchmaking dashboard also makes me wonder if there’s an Experiment running or if the Latency weights are messed up. If the matchmaking settings aren’t prioritizing a clean connection, it might be forcing us into these congested clusters instead of finding a better path.
Another thing I have noticed is that most Sao Paulo servers usually have a very low lifetime, about 5 minutes ~ 12 hours max.
I have genuinely no idea what would cause specifically IA to have this issue since we don’t even do anything out of the ordinary with anything networking related.
The theory is good, but I think there’s more to it than that, because I recently spent about an hour playing item asylum on a são paulo server without a vpn, and the lag spikes weren’t that strong, lasting approximately 10 seconds
But when I entered another game like the forge, the lag spike was much longer, lasting about a minute. Other games also fit these two differences
I think that, depending on the region where you live, roblox might use a different load balancer/edge for the exact game you want to play, which might be working perfectly, poorly, or practically unplayable, but it seems to be quite predictable, as the games that lag or don’t lag don’t seem to change. This probably will be my guess for a while
