Lag Progress

[Rothgar]

With this morning's update we made a fundamental change to how our zone servers throttle their frame rate.  Our hope is that this change will allow busier processes to consume more of the server resources and increase performance (reduce lag).  Whether or not this change has a noticeable impact will depend on many variables that can only be observed in the live environment and under a significant load. 

We'll be watching things on our end as we ramp up to primetime tonight but I'm also looking for your feedback as to whether or not you've noticed an improvement after this morning's changes.

Thanks!

[Aule]

Woot! /cross fingers

[Writer Cal]

Thanks for the update, Rothgar.

[PeaSy1]

Have you looked into the hardware side of things as well?

[Barx]

Dudoes@Nagafen wrote:

Have you looked into the hardware side of things as well?

Yeah, they'll just run down to best buy and pick up some more servers

(More seriously, they've already stated that they'll look at hardware for game servers after they finish upgrades to the database servers and/or redistribute it if they decide to merge some smaller servers).

[CoLD MeTaL]

If anything it's worse, and half the time i get kicked to char select now.

[GrunEQ]

Haven't noticed any improvement so far.  At least it's not worse.

[Thor71457]

Hi Server Cushbone Time 7:23 pm est Spell casting, I can count to 2 before it will cast.. Zoning , Is the same slow Hope this helps

[thecynic315]

Games feels like its studdering now with a bunch of pauses and Im noticing an increase of HD read/writes as this happens.

[Pakhet]

AB, no noticeable lag through raid. Which is a big improvement. Not sure if it is just not as many people populating the specific zone, or the patch helping.

[Rothgar]

Androw@Najena wrote:

Games feels like its studdering now with a bunch of pauses and Im noticing an increase of HD read/writes as this happens.

This is definitely client-side lag you're talking about which would not have been affected by our change.

Pakhet, good news about your raid on AB!  Hopefully others will have similar experiences.  I don't expect this change to eliminate lag completely, but it should definitely help, even if its not noticable in all cases.

[Barx]

Rothgar wrote:

Androw@Najena wrote:

Games feels like its studdering now with a bunch of pauses and Im noticing an increase of HD read/writes as this happens.

This is definitely client-side lag you're talking about which would not have been affected by our change.

Pakhet, good news about your raid on AB!  Hopefully others will have similar experiences.  I don't expect this change to eliminate lag completely, but it should definitely help, even if its not noticable in all cases.

So far in Perah Celsis's Abominable Laboratory on AB and lag is significantly reduced from the usual. Spells actually cast now without waiting 1-2 seconds for them to fire, hehe. I'll edit it once we get up to the fae (where I usually see the lag spike up) and when we've cleared it. But so far it's an anecdotal

Edit: Finished the zone, lag was much much better than before the patch over all.

[Sydares]

Lag on AB was improved today, but I'll hold off celebration until we hit a peak-hour weekend raid.

[Hecula]

Felt GH was laggier but our raids and the time I spent in the overland zones seemed better.

[Krystara]

I was on extremely briefly last night, but I noticed that crafting in Halas was actually possible last night. There was a definite improvement in the lag time between hitting a reaction and having it take effect. Not perfect, but definitely better.

[Rothgar]

I just wanted to check in again to see if there was any more feedback from tonight regarding spellcasting lag or other types of server-related lag.

[LardLord]

We were getting spikes in Underfoot Depths (whole raid just locking up for ~5 seconds), but that only happened a few times.

I can't comment more on the server lag, since my client can hardly run that zone...hard to differentiate between server lag and client lag when you're at 5 FPS

Additional info (edit):

-The lag spikes seemed to come on AE encounters mostly, though I think there was one on Vaclaz too.  -My computer runs the rest of the game fine on low settings, and there are 5 or 6 other people in my guild who have problems in this zone, so I think the zone may be causing problems (though, of course, not everyone experiences it).

[Aule]

Underfoot Depths as a whole was just as slow as it usually is. It didn't grind down to a go-somewhere-else halt, as it sometimes does when there's a buncha flags out front. Still, had people on decent performance settings hitting 5-10 fps. Part of the general lag problem is things like elemental toxicity, curse of darkness, spell curse, etc. The lag caused by casting those spells goes up exponentially once the target group size clears 4 or 5. On the 15 mob encounters it's not unusual to get to cast one spell, maybe two, during the 12 second fight. Also in Underfoot, lag is significantly higher if you are on the same height level as the majority of the nearby area. Master Syfak's road, AMU's upper platform, etc. If your z-axis goes up or down by any noticeable amount then lag clears up somewhat.

[fbi]

On LDL, zoning, especially into an item-limit guild hall seems to be much faster. Don't know if the tweaks done were designed for that or not, but if so thanks

[Barx]

Aule@Guk wrote:

Underfoot Depths as a whole was just as slow as it usually is. It didn't grind down to a go-somewhere-else halt, as it sometimes does when there's a buncha flags out front. Still, had people on decent performance settings hitting 5-10 fps. Part of the general lag problem is things like elemental toxicity, curse of darkness, spell curse, etc. The lag caused by casting those spells goes up exponentially once the target group size clears 4 or 5. On the 15 mob encounters it's not unusual to get to cast one spell, maybe two, during the 12 second fight. Also in Underfoot, lag is significantly higher if you are on the same height level as the majority of the nearby area. Master Syfak's road, AMU's upper platform, etc. If your z-axis goes up or down by any noticeable amount then lag clears up somewhat.

Yeah the lag in underfoot depths seemed primarily to be graphical when I was in there last (before these server-side changes, which shouldn't affect graphical lag). A lot of us were seeing a pretty significant drop in FPS in there compared to say Demetrik's or even the regular Hole zone, so there's clearly something in need of optimization. The FPS hit also was being reported by some folks as directional, although I didn't personally see where the best/worst directions were. But again that's FPS lag, which is a different animal from spell lag.

[Banditman]

It was about the same "overall" last night.  Overall being the key.

At times, it was very smooth, smoother than it has been in a while.  However, there were also times when it was nearly unplayable as well.  Just terrible.

This was on Kithicor, last night, between 8:30 EST and 11:30 EST.

[Banditman]

Barx@Antonia Bayle wrote:

 The FPS hit also was being reported by some folks as directional, although I didn't personally see where the best/worst directions were. But again that's FPS lag, which is a different animal from spell lag.

We had a couple people reporting radically changed FPS lag as well, also reported to be somewhat directional.  This is a change from the weekend.  If it was one or two people seeing this, ok, fine, client side.  However, we were hearing it from four or five people.

No idea what changed there.

[Zegon]

Last night in Perah Celsis's Abominable Laboratory on MM, we were getting slightly longer lag delays (anywhere from .4 to 1 second) in our abilities initially (7:40ish CST), but it cleared up once we hit the fae. Our enchanters couldn't keep perp up, for instance, and those of us who spam abilities were hampered pretty severely. We also had a couple spikes taking out the Hooluk which bugged out some people on rezes. Hope that helps.

[Phaso]

Our guild on Unrest for the past week or two, and including last night (6/30) wastes approx 15-25 minutes of raid time waiting on 2-3 people (never the same people) getting disconnected, kicked to character select, or crashing while zoning into zones, both new instances and public zones like Sundered Frontier and Stonebrunt Highlands. Last night in particular several of them had issues getting back into the game at all... this was around 10:45 Eastern, and our raid times are 8-11 Eastern. As far as casting lag goes, it seems to vary by zone. While I won't say we're getting inconsistent yet abyssmal performance as the case was a few weeks ago (2-3 second casting lag), it seems to be consistently not as responsive as it was before. Being an enchanter I probably notice it the most as I'm burning through spells pretty quickly. It's not terrible, but it feels like my spell hotkeys are more "sticky" now than they were before. One thing I have noticed recently is control effects, such as stuns/stifles/interrupts do not seem to register that they're cleared very well sometimes. I will see a detrimental expire (and it leaves my detrimental window), but my hotkeys are still dimmed for 0.5-2 seconds, which is a bit annoying. Is that possibly related to the issue which seemed to crop up with the SF release where stopping (after moving) does not seem to register correctly. What I mean there is I will run, stop, and begin to cast something, only to have the client tell me midway through casting that the spell was interrupted, presumably because the server still thinks I'm moving. I never noticed this behavior prior to SF unless my Internet connection was going south.

[Banditman]

Phaso@Unrest wrote:

Is that possibly related to the issue which seemed to crop up with the SF release where stopping (after moving) does not seem to register correctly. What I mean there is I will run, stop, and begin to cast something, only to have the client tell me midway through casting that the spell was interrupted, presumably because the server still thinks I'm moving. I never noticed this behavior prior to SF unless my Internet connection was going south.

I still see that pretty regularly.  Stop moving.  Start casting.  Interrupted (non-AE, etc).

[Spritelady]

Phaso@Unrest wrote:

Our guild on Unrest for the past week or two, and including last night (6/30) wastes approx 15-25 minutes of raid time waiting on 2-3 people (never the same people) getting disconnected, kicked to character select, or crashing while zoning into zones, both new instances and public zones like Sundered Frontier and Stonebrunt Highlands. Last night in particular several of them had issues getting back into the game at all... this was around 10:45 Eastern, and our raid times are 8-11 Eastern.

Exactly the same on Kithicor last night.

4 people that crashed to character select several times in Abominable Labs (one on zone in, 2 others repeatedly throughout the zone and 1 that crashed at the twins and was unable to reenter trying to enter from char select would just keep dumping him out of game and back to char select again. Trying to relog, kept getting an "unable to perform version check" error until he uninstalled and reinstalled the station launcher.

Zone times for me were unchanged.  Still averaging 2-5 minutes to zone into raid instances.

[Tehom]

On the whole, command lag seemed to be better so far in our first raiding since the patch. I did want to echo what other people have said about Underfoot Depths causing really bad framerates though - that's zone specific, but it's almost unique in how rough it is.

[GrunEQ]

On Test, I was experiencing a bunch of lag last night.

[Arcanemundi]

I know you are looking for complaints, but we actually had a lag-free night for the most part last night, which was unusual for our server.  Not sure if it was a fluke or a result of some internal behind-the-scenes change.

[Barx]

Banditman wrote:

Phaso@Unrest wrote:

Is that possibly related to the issue which seemed to crop up with the SF release where stopping (after moving) does not seem to register correctly. What I mean there is I will run, stop, and begin to cast something, only to have the client tell me midway through casting that the spell was interrupted, presumably because the server still thinks I'm moving. I never noticed this behavior prior to SF unless my Internet connection was going south.

I still see that pretty regularly.  Stop moving.  Start casting.  Interrupted (non-AE, etc).

Yeah I see that all the time as well. You not moving any more and the spell cast don't seem to get there in the right order sometimes, so if you're quick to fire something off when you stop it gets interrupted half a second or so later.