Y.A.L.T. (Yet Another Lag Thread)

[Drum69]

Hello,

I play from the UK on the Argonnessen server and have been experiencing such bad lag that DDO is unplayable for me. I’m lucky if I can get from one side of the market to the other without the game freezing multiple times. And when I say freeze, I mean absolutely nothing works for about 30 seconds. I’m unable to play any quests because of this.

I’ve followed Turbine’s advice on setting the firewall on my PC. I’ve tried playing using only DirectX 9 rather than 10. I’ve tried tweaking the settings using advice from these forums and around the web.
I’m willing to do detective work to nail the problem, but I’m not too sure how to proceed. I *think* that the most likely cause is the connection to the server, does anyone know if there is anything I can do to monitor the connection?

Also, is it possible to put the client into a debug mode? Any logs could be useful in finding out what it’s trying to do when a freeze occurs.

My thanks to anyone taking the time to respond,

Drum.

[zztophat]

It used to be when I would log in to the game there would be some annoying stuttering and a low FPS when running through a public area (market) while things loaded but after a time it would clear up. Since update 5 I try to avoid running through the market because it's like that constantly now.

Having discussed it with my guildies it seems I'm not alone with the issue, some attribute the problem to changes in the engine but no one has been able to pin down the exact cause.

Don't expect the devs to care too much, after all the issue seems to only effect certain computers and clearly not the ones they are using so I doubt they even know much about it. Submit a bug report for now.



For now, do the standard virus/adware/spyware checks. I don't know if that will help you, since DDO has started running so terribly for me I've done everything but taking my machine apart and cleaning the heat sinks again (did it only 3 months ago) to find the cause. It's unique to DDO I know that for certain. One thing I have found that is interesting, is that everything else runs the same as before unless I run DDO for a time then close it. If I run DDO then exit everything runs far worse. It could be a memory leak but even after I use a smart ram to free up all my ram I can't get my machine running at peak performance again until I restart it.

[AbsynthMinded]

Save yourself the trouble. They won't fix it the way THEY KNOW it needs to be addressed. Because it would be a huge cash outlay for the hardware and personnel required to deal properly with these issues.

It's not your system at fault, I'd wager.

U5 continues to haunt us. Game quality has suffered greatly because a failure in proper oversight. I suspect U7 to address some issues, but not improve performance. Yet new stuff will come out and do bad things to the game, so any ground gained will be shaky at best, and we will at worst slide backwards even further.

[azrael4h]

Is this the same on every server? I have a guildie in Australia and one in Norway, and both don't have that much an issue, though U5 about quadrupled (literally) their lag as well as mine. We're on Khyber.

[Tumarek]

Ah first of all they are working on u5 lag... lets see if they are actually successful.

I play from germany on argonessen and have some problem with lag every now and then too. But i know for fact it is my connection and my crappy old PC. I have watched shroud runs on a pc of a friend of mine who lives in the same city and they are very smooth.

The marketplace has lot of textures and lot of players running around... this kills some older machines. Try playing around with the display settings.

[Drum69]

Thanks for the info folks, I'm sorry that others are suffering as well, but it's nice to know that I'm not alone!

My problems started when update 5 came out. Unfortunatly, I had taken a two week break just before U5 and in that time I built a new PC. I came back to DDO after three weeks and can't play due to this blasted freezing. I would live with it if it only happend in safe areas, but it happens on quests too, not much fun getting beaten up when you cant defend yourself.

I've tried playing with the display settings and have noted that:

Increasing the texture cache does nothing, nor does it increase the time between freezes.
I tried playing in DirectX 9 mode, at first I thought this helped, but the freezes still happened.
I've downloaded and installed the client software again. No change.
The freezes happen in fullscreen and windowed mode. During a freeze I can see that all CPU activity for the process drops to zero.

I think that I'll start trying different servers to see if they have the same problem.

Once again thanks for posting, if anyone else had any suggestions, please feel free to comment.

Best regards,

Drum.

[bigolbear]

back when update 5 came out i too had a problem, infact i had this problem on 2 pc's.

I fixed it - and it was the strangest thing, i changed my mice. You see when U5 came out there was also a windows update at the same time and this caused problems with USB responces monitoring, and it seems that when ddo isnt getting proper responces from whatever api its using to monitor the mouse it freezes (for about 10 -30 seconds).

I admit that my mice werent great but they were functional - maybe they stuttered a bit in windows but in ddo it caused long freezes.

so a 10er on new mice and issue solved, i also ran a fix on my usb divice drivers and controler (this was what keyed me into the problem).

As a point there was a thread about this at the time and i know i wasnt alone suffewring the problem you are talking about.

Hope this advice helps.

[Drum69]

Thanks for the the reply, I'll give it a go.

But I'm not going to be pleased if my Roccat Kone mouse is incompatible with DDO!