Hireling/Lag glitch

[crschoen]

I'm not sure if this has already been reported or is a known issue, but I have noticed that when soloing quests or explorer areas with a hireling cleric I will on occasion encounter massive game server lag spikes.

What it looks like from my point of view is that the monsters stop moving and my weapon attacks do not register even though I can freely attack and swing my weapons. This will last for about 30 seconds to 2 minutes, and then it seems like the server "catches up" and I get a rapid series of dice rolls, damage numbers, and dead monsters.

It's pretty easy to recreate. Just take a fighter or other mellee character, grab a cleric hireling and head into the Vale of Twilight or The Monsastary of the Scorpion quest alone with just the hireling and start killing things. About 15-20 minutes into either area you'll encounter these huge lag spikes.

[juki919]

yesterday i was doin ritual sacrifice with guildie - he left ddo about year ago and now started to play again - i wanted to show him that times are realy better now. There were just 2 of us + 2x cleric hireling (me, lvl20 fighter, he lvl 17 rogue). First lag we experienced in portal part, rogue got 2-3 minute lag. Ok, no biggie i can handle myself. Second time was near end, when u have to protect some guy. I got about 5 MINUTE lag ! ! ! rogue cannot kill mobs, heal himself, heal guy running to end at the same time. I was just cluelessly running around hoping to dmg something that my friend sees on his screen. We died, my friend told me. I was still seeing me with full hp, when respawn button appeared. After respawning, i was running in city in ghost mode I tried to relog - didnt help - still ghost. nwm, let me just chat with friends then.. after a while i died again (in town). Maybe lag finally stopped.
We failed. I showed my friend that times in ddo are realy better now.
..
this lag is mostly seen when hirelings are trying to do many things at once. I've seen this kind of lag even when no hirelings were up. What helps is do not use hireling, or at least park him somewhere far behind battle and heal yourself after battle.

[AltheaSteelrain]

This is also what happens to me. Especially landing a hireling blade barrier. Its almost the same as casting time stop for the enemy.

[Scoundrel]

Can we plz fix this alrdy, There’s nothing more annoying then to die when you have almost completed the quest

This happens to me a lot since I like to grab a Cleric henchman rather than stand around waiting for a lfm to fill up.

I don’t want to be too sharp in my criticism but lately it seem like you have been focusing on all the wrong things.
Low level content when all are screaming for high level ones.
Bugs old as the game itself don’t get fixed and you bring in more new ones every update. Enhancements not working as described or not at all.

I know it’s not easy, but maybe it’s time to actually put some time in to clearing some of these bugs up. And if that means you have to put some of these quest packs you been given us lately on hold that’s fine by me.
Off course if you can do both at the same time I’ll send you a cake

[Scoundrel]

Phax’s Fixes: Hireling Lag
Posted On: August 26th, 2010
Posted By: Phax
Posted in: Bug Fixes
Hireling Lag. I’m talking about the client freezing, only my avatar is moving, why did time just seem to stop, lag.

I was a little dubious about how quickly I’d be able to fix this problem, after reading in the bug report “unable to repro internally”. When you don’t have the ability to reproduce a bug in your development environment, it makes it hard to figure out whats wrong. Kind of like a detective trying to figure out a murder without any forensic evidence.

Luckily, after talking with people who play with hirelings often I found that on live this issue was much more common than I realized.

So with bated breath I sent out an email to the team asking them to collect some logs for me while they played on live. (I had already spent a while attempting to reproduce it myself, without luck.)

Not a couple hours later I had a log file from one of our resident engineers in my inbox. Evidence! I was able to quickly identify the problem with these logs in hand. There was a single message (UpdateHirelingStatus) being sent to the client hundreds of times per second!

With this smoking gun, it looks like this hireling lag will be a thing of the past.

-Phax

Great news...what kind of cake do you like Phax?