I see alot of people asking and talking about lag or laggy or various other versions of that word.
From Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag
In computing and especially computer networks, a lag is a symptom where result of an action appears later than expected. While different kinds of latency are well defined technical terms, lag is the symptom, not the cause.
Latency is the time taken for a packet of data to be sent from one application, travel to, and be received by another application. This includes transit time over the network, and processing time at the source and the destination computers. Specifically, this is the time for encoding the packet for transmission and transmitting it, the time for that serial data to traverse the network equipment between the nodes, and the time to get the data off the circuit. This is also known as "one-way latency". A minimum bound on latency is determined by the distance between communicating devices and the speed at which the signal propagates in the circuits (typically 70-95% of the speed of light). Actual latency is much higher, due to packet processing in networking equipment, and other traffic.
While strictly every packet experiences lag, the term lag is used to refer to delays noticeable to the user. Latency is directly related to the physical distance that data travels. Thus the time taken for a packet to travel from a computer server in Europe to a client in the same region is likely to be shorter than the time to travel from Europe to the Americas or Asia. But protocols and well written code that avoid unnecessary data transmissions are less affected by the latency inherent in a network. Modern corporate networks have devices to cache frequently requested data and accelerate protocols, thus reducing application response time, the cumulative effect of latency.
------------------ (just to be clear the 3 paragraphs above are from the WIKI link not from mei) ^_^
click the linky above for more info on lag and how you can improve your performance and squish lag in your LAN/WAN setup. (if it is possible for you)
One thing to note is lag is not when you have a slow video card, driver problem or some other local poor performance that gives you low FPS scores in your off-line video games. But many of us have seen poster that also call low FPS performance lag. So I will make this post a sticky for a period of time so people who get confused when they are told their games are lagging when they are not even playing online understand what the person trying to help them is really trying to say. "That your frames per second are slow and inconsistent and you need more power to smooth it out."
Well I hope this helps feel free to PM me with any additions or thoughts you would like to see added to this sticky.
Thanks
MeiLing