Increase guest limit

[ascorbic]

Is the five guest limit in place for technical reasons, or is it something that can be increased? I tried using it for a class that I'm running, and was disappointed that most people couldn't join. It would be great if this could be increased. 15-person collaborative debugging would be fun, and very useful for learning.

[Chuxel]

@ascorbic Thanks for raising the issue. There is of course an upper limit where performance will degrade but that is highly dependent on the situation and we've found that the current limit provides a good experience even in resource constrained scenarios. That said, we're definitely planning to raise the limit over time at least as an option - the question is how high we should go and validate. With that in mind, a couple of questions for you:

1. What would you see as a reasonable upper-limit?
2. What tool was everyone using? (VS Code Mac? VS?)

[ascorbic]

Hi @Chuxel. In my case the limit would be around 15-20, as the course I'm running is classroom-based. We're all using VS Code Mac, and in this course currently using Chrome and Jest debugging. We'll probably use React Native too once #164 is fixed.

The upper end of those numbers (and more) would rely on something like #55 and possibly #87 if they were to be kept from getting out of hand. If those were available, this could potentially be used in much larger scenarios, such as online courses. Could read-only and pinned views help limit resource usage?

[Chuxel]

@ascorbic Thanks. for the info! Read-only could help, but we have not gotten 20 people together to hammer on things to see where the breaking point is and we've got issues like #47 to nail down as well.

This is good info - in the past we've heard 25 being the potential upper limit, so 15-20 seems in line with that. We'll defiantly keep this in mind as we move forward!

[rgeraldporter]

I would also like to say more than 5 would be very useful, even if only in a read-only context. Hosting a coding workshop with remote folks in our company means using screen sharing via Slack or Skype, and the data footprint (not to mention fuzziness/clarity resulting) is much less than optimal. I would imagine the amount of data being used for a Live Share session would be much less than full on screensharing?

Also - long-term, I could see this being a great broadcast medium for coding demos across the web in general, much less data footprint of course than a twitch broadcast, though would lack the ability to play-back later.

Thank you for this feature - we've tried many solutions for addressing this and have always fallen back to awkward screensharing, I think this is the first implementation that might stick for us!

[AlanBarber]

Just to add my two cents... I help run a developer user group and I could see using LS to do coding demos as very helpful. Allowing the attendees the ability to load up and view the codebase from their own laptop instead of just staring at the code projected up on a big screen would allow freedom to explore and look at the sample code.

That being said, in a situation like this, we would need to support upwards of 50 users at a time that would be given readonly access.

[ghost]

Can the limit be increased to more than 30. I was actually teaching a course and require a live share session so that all my 30 students can work together on a project. It would be great if LiveShare supports it

[cwadrupldijjit]

I also would like it to be a higher limit, as I teach a class and it would be an invaluable resource.

@Chuxel: If you're ever wanting to get a group of 20 developers going at the same time to hammer it out, I'd be willing to donate some of my time to help in that process.

[lostintangent]

@cosmoferrito @cwadrupldijjit Thanks for reaching out! Could you share a little bit about the exact use case you have in mind for Live Share? Are you thinking about using it to drive a classroom lecture, with everyone in the class interactively following along? Enabling students to collaborate with each other on group projects? Allowing students to request help from you on assignments? Something else?

We have some other planned work that might be beneficial for education scenarios, and so it would just be extremely helpful to understand the scenario you’d be interested in leveraging Live Share. Thanks!

[cwadrupldijjit]

@lostintangent: Any one of those scenarios could be useful. I've tried working on a project with another instructor where I was working on some back-end code and he was working on some front-end code, and that seemed to work decently (though being able to add files would be nice). Driving lectures with a read-only live share would be useful, so students can make notes based off of code they can copy and review on their own machines while preventing them from being able to directly control anything including the debugging session or terminal. Sometimes, it is useful to be able to collaborate with the student from a distance so that I could provide suggestions or solutions for them to try when they encounter problems and they reach out to me to consult with them. There's also possibility that on group projects, they could share code from one computer, though that only works as well as the person whose computer they're on is available, so unless they're mob programming, it may not be as useful.

I think you summarized many of those different applications well.

[lostintangent]

Hey everyone! In the latest Live Share update for VS Code, we enabled the ability to increase the guest limit to 30! 🚀🔥 However, this is a highly experimental feature, and so it’s not currently enabled by default. If you’d like to give it a spin, the host simply needs to set the “liveshare.features” setting to “experimental” and you’ll be good to go.

If folks try it out, please let us know how it went, and what we can do to improve. We’re currently working on read-only support as well (which we believe is a compliment to this), so we’ll keep you posted on the status of that. Thanks!

[CoolDadTx]

I need this for VS 2017. We live code in my class and I have up to 30 students writing the same code I am. Some simply cannot type fast enough so they are slowing the class down. I was hoping to use this extension to be able to code live and let students be able to copy/paste into their own VS instance if needed.

[lostintangent]

@CoolDadTx You are in luck :) This has now been addressed in the latest Live Share release, for both VS and VS Code 🔥 Note that even though this has been "promoted" to stable, you still need to enable a setting to allow up to 30 guests. Check out the release notes for more details.

I'm going to close this as resolved, but it would be awesome if folks could let us know if they start using Live Share for classrooms, and if so, how it's going 👍

[timdams]

We just tested this in class but the upper limited of 5 was still there:

• The option "increased guest limit" was already set to 'true' so I didn't need to change it
• I enabled live share on VS 2019 Community
• Only 5 students were able to connect.

Did I miss something?

[CoolDadTx]

We had the same issue initially. I went in and played around with a few settings and nothing worked. Restarting VS which restarts the LS process resolved the issue for me. Evidently some of the options you can configure require VS to be restarted to take effect. I wish somebody would document these.

[daytonellwanger]

@fubaduba FYI opportunity for better documentation and happy users :)

[PeterMilovcik]

I've just test it in our classroom with 20 students and it failed to connect more than 5 with read-only, option "Increased guest limit" is enabled to True. VS2019 Community Edition (16.3.4 - host, 16.4.5 guests).
What can I change to have it working?

[CoolDadTx]

We had the same issue the first time we tried to run it. Everything was set but it didn't stick. I terminated the session (which kicked everyone out and reset the URL, naturally) and then toggled a few settings including turning off and back on the guest limit. Then restart VS so the LS process restarts. Then my students were able to connect.

I cannot remember the settings I adjusted but I believe they included diagnostic logging, open shared servers and connection mode.

[daytonellwanger]

There's a setting under Tools -> Options -> Live Share -> General -> Advanced called "Increased guest limit." Ensure this is set to true and restart VS. Let me know if that doesn't work. cc @fubaduba

[thebetterjoe]

thanks

[dnalneh]

I'm planning a live lecture soon and just wanted to ask, if 30 joined guests are able to read and write or are only able to read?

[Btibert3]

I am curious to know the largest number of students connected in a read-only mode. I have ~50 across my sessions; I would want read-only, but it seems like I might be out-of-bounds.

Is there an officially supported max number?

[CoolDadTx]

@Btibert3, 30 is the current limit with the appropriate option set for Visual Studio. AFAIK there is no way to change this to be higher.

Whether the users are read only or not isn't relevant to the guest limit from what I can tell. I've never had any issues but I always run as read only because I don't want students mucking with my code.

[Btibert3]

Got it, thank you

[lostintangent]

@CoolDadTx Out of curiosity: are you regularly using Live Share for driving lectures? We've been looking to learn more from folks using it for that, and so I'd love to learn more from you 😁

[CoolDadTx]

@lostintangent yes I use it every class after the first week and have so for several years. We live code in class and historically some students cannot keep up with the typing as we get into more complex code blocks. I enable LS at the start of class and share the link out to them. Students may then connect to my instance in read only mode and copy the code I'm typing instead of doing it themselves. It is an aid for students who cannot type.

It isn't perfect though. Every semester I have to learn, during class, what isn't working correctly anymore. 1 semester I was seeing each students name next to where they were viewing in the file I was in even though I had disabled those options (I think), last semester when I started the debugger all my breakpoints would be removed. For several semesters now I have disabled the option to see notifications when students connect/disconnect but I still get notified in the middle of talking that student X left the session. But these are minor issues and my evals show that students really like the ability to copy code as I type it over going to Github later to copy the file as a whole. Sharing the link is also annoying. I'd really like to set up a persisted link for the semester, which I think you can do in VS Code. I understand you can set up contacts but since not every students attends every lecture and they would still need to check email it isn't that useful.

[Btibert3]

I would love to use it in my lectures. Currently I am writing code and students have to keep up. My use case fits very well with what might be possible, but I have 50 students in my sessions, so scale is an issue for me.

[a7madgamal]

I have a conference talk soon and would love to be able to increase the limit to more than 30
I'm interested in a read-only mode where the audience can use vscode to follow along on their editor instead of watching code on a screen.
I hope someone can answer those questions.

• does increasing the limit affect the host machine's performance?
• can we add a "use at your own risk" option to override the number of options (while setting another higher upper limit)

Also, as an FYI, I'm willing to pay for this option (premium live-share?), and I would guess many clients will also be interested in having higher limits for the read-only mode. Thumps up if you agree 😅

[Btibert3]

I am no longer in my teaching role, but this would have been great for my classes which were 40-50 students per session.