Casting Lag, maybe network related?

[Stubbswick]

<p>I wasn't sure whether to post this question here, or the connection support section.</p><p>I've been experiencing mysterious lag issues lately, and I'm having trouble figuring out the cause.  It seems to manifest as a casting lag (click on a button, and a few seconds later it actually casts), or a network lag.  It's not graphics related, because I don't notice any slowdown in the display.</p><p>What's weird to me is that I have a friend that plays on the same LAN, and whenever I say it's happening, he's experiencing nothing.  Even more strange, I play with a second account on a laptop that connects wirelessly through the LAN.  Normally, it's much slower than my computer (for obvious reasons), but lately it's actually been faster.  Doing the same quests, I'll hear the quest update "ding" on the laptop a second or two before I hear on my computer.  Or I'll look over to the laptop and see my character appear to be running ahead when I know he's stopped, and then snap back into place.</p><p>It's just weird to me that I've been experiencing this for just the last few weeks, and two other computers on my network haven't.  Anyone else experiencing this? Or know what I should try?</p>

[TemberWolf]

<p>Try updating your network card drives or uninstalling them and reinstalling them with freshly downloaded drivers if there isn't an update. It could be that your network card is failing. If you have two network cards, try using the other one or get a wireless card to test with. Net cards a super cheap; like $10 cheap, so don't sweat it if you card dies.</p><p>Check you firewall settings. I used to use a firewall other than the windows firewall and every time the everquest2.exe file was updated my firewall freaked out. Some times I had to clear the list of "GOOD" programs to get it to work right.</p><p>Also, everquest 2's servers operate on a 1 second time lag. This is normal. You will do something on your screen, then someone else will see this action 1 second later. That was done to help prevent massive amounts of information being sent to and from the servers, plus to and from the users, which helps latency for the dial-up users(dial-up was the normal ISP interface back when this game was being developed).</p>

[Stubbswick]

<p><cite>TemberWolf wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Try updating your network card drives or uninstalling them and reinstalling them with freshly downloaded drivers if there isn't an update. It could be that your network card is failing. If you have two network cards, try using the other one or get a wireless card to test with. Net cards a super cheap; like $10 cheap, so don't sweat it if you card dies.</p><p>Check you firewall settings. I used to use a firewall other than the windows firewall and every time the everquest2.exe file was updated my firewall freaked out. Some times I had to clear the list of "GOOD" programs to get it to work right.</p><p>Also, everquest 2's servers operate on a 1 second time lag. This is normal. You will do something on your screen, then someone else will see this action 1 second later. That was done to help prevent massive amounts of information being sent to and from the servers, plus to and from the users, which helps latency for the dial-up users(dial-up was the normal ISP interface back when this game was being developed).</p></blockquote><p>I will try updating network card drivers.</p><p>Doesn't seem to be a firewall issue - I only have windows firewall enabled, and EQ2 is on the whitelist.</p><p>Also, I understand the servers have that lag - but that's what was weird.  I was seeing things happen to my character on the <strong>other</strong> computer before on my computer.</p><p>The only other thing I tried was one day I got fed up and went to check network utilization in the Task Manager.  I happened to notice that the EQ2 executable was over 1 GB memory usage.  I minimized EQ2, which I know clears a lot of the memory usage, and it appeared to temporarily fix the lag, but it wasn't long before it came back.</p><p>Maybe it's a RAM issue, not a network issue.  It's just odd, because I have max RAM for a 32 bit OS, and my CPU is a core 2 quad.  Over 1GB memory usage is a lot for EQ2, but that shouldn't be an issue when I have nothing else running that's process/memory intensive.</p>