Hi,
Yes, the two are somehow related. PCIbex’s servers are very slow these days, because the configuration is not ideal. I should reset them at some point, but that means that they will go down for some time, halting any ongoing data collection, that’s why I’ve been postponing it.
One difference between the Ibex and the PCIbex Farm is that the former cannot host multimedia resources, while the latter can. Each time your experiment fetches an image/audio/video file, it sends a request to the server. The more multimedia files in your experiment, and the more participants and experiments are run at the same time, the more requests must be processed in parallel by the server. This is one reason why the Ibex Farm is usually faster than the PCIbex Farm.
If you’re already using your own server to save the collected audio samples, I’d suggest you host all your multimedia resources there if that’s not already the case. I also recommend you compress them all in a single ZIP file, so that your experiment sends only one global request instead of one per audio/image/video file. Note that I had participants experience serious slowdowns before on the original Ibex Farm because my experiment was sending many requests for resource files to an external server.
One workaround when updating your scripts is to edit them locally and upload them to your project, instead of using the online editor on the farm.
I apologize for the inconvenience and will try to get the new PCIbex Farm up soon
Jeremy