Mystic is an online or 'Cloud Based' application, and there are one or two very important concepts that need to be understood - especially if you are only used to using applications which run primarily on your desktop.

In a desktop application, all activity taking place is within the memory of the computer on which you are working - and computer memory is extremely fast. The biggest impacts on speed which you will encounter in this environment is data access to a hard-disk, which is still largely a mechanical device and therefore is extremely slow by comparison; and, redrawing the screen when a long process is being undertaken. In this latter case the speed delay is not because the display is slow, but because operating systems typically regard screen updates to be the least important of all of the actions being undertaken (i.e. the process of adding 2+2 is regarded as more important than updating the screen to tell you how it is being done).

In an online application, activity takes place in a mixture of your local Internet Browser (which may be MS Edge, Opera, Chrome, Safari, Brave etc.), and the server on which the application is running. Local activities will remain extremely fast, such as the operation of common on-screen controls like text boxes, buttons, sliders etc. Activities taking place on the server are also extremely fast, as the server is usually an even bigger, faster and more powerful machine than the one that you are working on.

Unfortunately, between your local browser and the server is the Internet.

Some activities that you ask the application to do will remain local. These activities are parts of the application which are attached to buttons and menu selections which have been pre-downloaded by the application to your browser and which do not need additional data to perform their task.

For many other activities, clicking a button or an item in a list can only perform their job by sending that request back to the server - usually because new data is required, or perhaps because you are requesting to save new data to a database. In either case, the local browser needs to package that request and send it across the internet, wait for the server to perform the task required of it, then send some sort of confirmation or screen update back to the browser so that you can see that the task has been completed.

It is the communications across the internet which introduces a [usually] slight delay in the process - especially as in the modern world we need to use secure communications, each of which needs to be encrypted using a certificate key at a third-location. This means even more communications across the internet than you would expect.

All of the following can slow down the communication between your browser and the server:

• Other large applications running simultaneously - this can cause issues if the applications are consuming a great deal of memory, and therefore forcing your browser to cache more often.
• Other tabs open in your browser running certain web-pages - some social-media websites use more and more caching space. One common social media site will easily use more than half of your computers memory for caching.
• Large numbers of workstations using the simultaneously using the high-content internet on your spur of the local network (e.g. video) - if your local network all runs through a single point, this can cause a bottle-neck.
• As above, but at the organisation level - many schools, colleges, private companies alleviate this by having very high band-width networks or even fibre.
• Local to the area, known internet speed or bandwidth issues - some internet providers are unfortunately limited by the hardware that previous telecoms companies have put into the ground.
• Very high internet usage in the area - this has become an increasing problem as more and more internet-enabled devices are created. Telecoms companies are countering this by improving internet quality around the country, and offering fibre.
• Very high usage of the application at a particular moment in time - Esferico have introduced load-balanced servers to counter this eventuality.

While this collection of known communications bottle necks seem extreme, the reality is that the delay is actually very minor - potentially fractions of a second, with some of the above limited to slowing the initial connection and not the overall speed of the communication itself (what in networking is called latency).

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