LemonadeLXP serves its videos through AWS Cloudfront, one of the world's foremost low latency & high-transfer-speed content delivery networks. It has over 310 globally dispersed points of presence with automated network mapping - you'll always pull files from the nearest content node. It is exceptionally fast.
If your videos are buffering, the culprit is undoubtedly within your network. This article's purpose is to help you debug "where."
Connection Speed an Issue?
If you work in a building with a shared connection, you could be feeling the effects of inadequate bandwidth (based on demand). Your first stop might be to perform a speed test from the affected station (at periods when you see it buffering) to understand your bandwidth. Some great speed-test sites, such as https://www.speedtest.net, will give you results that you can communicate to your IT staff. You can then report, "Online videos are buffering, and running a bandwidth test, I'm getting a download speed of 500k/sec. Can you help?"
This same connection speed logic might apply if you are working from home. If you have spotty service or a lot of packet loss from your residential modem, you will undoubtedly get streaming interruptions. If you call your ISP, they might be able to offer some advice or send a technical rep to investigate.
In a similar vein, if you are working on a bustling WiFi network, it could be that your router is at capacity. Can you try a wired connection?
As well, it could be channel congestion. Multiple WiFi networks on the same channel can lead to a significant drop in connection quality (more common in residential settings, where routers sometimes ship with default channel settings). Channels might not be what you think (we're not talking 2.4GHz or 5GHz here); routers operate on "channels" that are small bands within the larger frequency band, like radio channels, that determine the wave frequency range that your router uses to transmit wireless signal. Your router's admin panel usually has a dropdown that lets you select which channel it'll use.
Are you using a VPN?
If you use a VPN system that forces tunneling, the VPN appliance could be your choke point. These devices will typically apply quality-of-service rules that might be prioritizing voice over IP services, similarly scheduling things like multimedia dead last. Try disconnecting from the VPN after signing into LemonadeLXP to see if the issues persist. If disconnecting from the VPN solves the problem, you have identified the issue!
Has Our Firewall Guide Been Observed?
The last component to check would be next-generation-firewalls. These are also called "scan and serve" appliances. The way they operate is that instead of serving content directly to you (as the Internet intends), it is first served to the appliance. The appliance scans all content for malware and viruses and only then streams to your computer.
Scanning content can eat up a lot of appliance bandwidth; this can quickly become a bottleneck, especially if the scan settings are very aggressive and the appliance doesn't have a lot of room for overhead.
In our firewall guide, we recommend setting "bypass" rules for scan-and-serve appliances to guarantee quality of service. Make sure to integrate these LemonadeLXP-specific firewall rules into your security matrix.
Local Virus Scanners?
If you've checked all of the above, e.g., you have substantial bandwidth, no security appliance (or the proper bypass rules are installed), and you are not connected through a VPN - you might have to examine your workstation.
Where you'll want to turn to your IT staff for help at the workstation level, here are some guiding questions that might help:
Do you have a local virus scanner that could be chewing up your CPU?
Are you out of hard drive space and this is affecting caching?
Are you on a very old workstation that is just "generally slow"?
Do you have a multitude of applications open that are consuming your memory?
Most importantly, can you try from a different device on the same network? If it works on another device, it might just be "computer issues"!
Good luck!