Stream Buffering Troubleshooting

Stream buffering can be caused by a number of things, but first and foremost we need to ask the question: Are we dropping frames? Check the counter at the bottom of the OBS Studio main window:

Dropped Frames? Check Stream Connection Troubleshooting instead

Often, you will not drop frames and still have viewers complaining about lag, buffering, or the stream constantly loading. Why is that and what can we do against it? First of all let us take a look at the why.

Why does my stream lag/buffer/load for my viewers?

Different viewers tune in from different places all over the world with differing internet connections, devices and locations. Your friend mayb be able to watch your stream on their powerful desktop machine + fiber internet connection, while a different viewer is on their older iphone, watching on a spotty mobile connection.

If you want to reach the widest audience, it may be beneficial for you to take extra care to make sure more people will be able to watch, especially if the service you're on does not provide transcoding.

What steps can I take to accommodate my viewers?

Bitrate

Lowering the bitrate, and taking a hit to resolution, quality, framerate etc may still be the correct choice if you're looking to grow your audience. Take care to not set it unreasonably high, especially when if you don't have access to transcodes.

Staying within the platform's recommendations

Even if you can technically push the platform, your encoder, latency and your computer to the extra level in terms of quality, does not mean that every device will be able to handle this. If you care for reaching the most people, it's recommended to respect the platforms recommendations.