I'm curious to know how arena pairings work?

From some experience it seems like it waits for a round of pairings to finish before repairing players.

I feel like in some extent that's maybe a bit inconvenient if that is what it does, and in other cases it's very much not what would be wanted.

Sometimes you end up with a standby pairing message for like 10 minutes, and then have like 15s to play a move when it randomly decides to start pairing again.

It can also be the case that there's certainly people available to be pairing but no pairing is happening. Did any games of scrambled eggs happen here? playstrategy.org/tournament/PaZ6kQnB

It seemed like the way the pairing works you can even just miss entire rounds of the medley. I've been sitting waiting for amazons repairings for half of the available time because my othello game finished late.

Is there any alternatives or other ideas on how and when the pairings should run? Is it just that one doesn't want to incentivise playing and finishing fast in order to squeeze more games in or?

Thanks for raising this, the pairing system works the same way as in Lichess. This system works better when there are larger numbers of players. Perhaps we need to change how this works when there are only a few players (e.g. <10).
There are waves of pairings during the tournament, where it tries to pair players. Unless there are only a few players (I think 2) it will avoid playing you against the same opponent. This means that two players could be waiting for some time for another game to finish before pairing them. The bot wont join in the pairing as long as there are (I think 3 active) players in the tournament.
Player can also appear active but will need to click "return to tournament" to be included back into the pairing pool.
Generally finishing games faster will result in getting more games.

I’ll be curious to see other peoples experiences and comments also.

It just seems it could be useful to have a discussion, at least as you said while the average number of players on a random arena might be small enough, or it might be that a number of the players are paused and so on.