performance

[levesque2004]

last night, on cannith (the server i frequent), was running distruptor because my arti build rocks there, to get a bunch of boxes for the +2 loot event. a friend was with me for some of the runs. we succeeded, but it was a lag nightmare. with my friend, i'd estimate 50% of my (granted, summoned) bolts went off target, even when i was manually targetting. no to hit roll, nothing. even in volleys, one or two wouldn't be resolved at all. she had similar issues. i should mention the rubberbanding as well, it was pretty bad. no way to tell where precisely the server thought you were, unless you stood still for a second or two.

i did have a hire out, only to increase the number of starting bosses at the large extractors (that's a different, weird issue, but liveable). she (flower) was getting stuck after every single fight. actually, during most fights she'd just stop. i understand she's "trying to make up her mind" what to do next, but come on. she'll sit there for a full minute before breaking out of it. or i "passive then defensive" her again.

solo the game ran considerably better, even after, say, 2 hours of running in group. only about 20% of my shots were ignored. no hire either. still got bursts of rubber band lag, but not nearly as bad.

now i discover, g-land went down last night. and here i thought they'd "fixed" the server side memory leak and instability issue. guess not.

i don't want to bash the devs. it's not the fault of the developers. it's a programmer issue. the hire thing is just one example. the memory leak another. a third, restarting the client helped. that's a memory leak on the client side.

this game's performance is lousy, especially with risia going. cc is gonna kill these poor servers. it's by far my favorite event, and i've stopped asking for it because of this. the performance issues are a sign of sloppy programming, maybe not the current set of programmers, but memory leaks? really? i've done a little programming, maybe not mmo based, but i can program enough to know how bad memory leaks are. and in my development, the free unix tool electric fence was wonderful in pointing out my shortcomings on that. so, my code didn't have memory leaks. or endless loops (see the hire behavior? endless loop).

there are tools out there. please, please, use them. find these leaks. find these broken loops. fix them. i know it's not glamorous to do, but geez, the game's awful without it. and if i were just trying out this game for the first time, and it was running this badly, do you think i'd even consider subscribing? not durn likely. there's you justification for spending the time on it with the managers/bean counters.

so, to the poor programmers who (i hope) will get to fix this mess, good luck and good hunting.

[kutscd01a]

Is the client supposed to use up over 1GB of RAM while being played? I watch my system resources throughout the day because I run a lot of RAM intensive programs while 'working' and playing. The DDO client is always at the top of the resource list and consistently uses around 1GB of RAM. Is this typical or is there something wrong with my client? I will say that it has done this on all 4 systems I have ever installed it on.

[My2Cents]

On the rare occasions I've checked I've been getting 1.1 or 1,2GB Ram for Low Res Client on WinXP (32 bit).

[fco-karatekid]

Is the client supposed to use up over 1GB of RAM while being played? I watch my system resources throughout the day because I run a lot of RAM intensive programs while 'working' and playing. The DDO client is always at the top of the resource list and consistently uses around 1GB of RAM. Is this typical or is there something wrong with my client? I will say that it has done this on all 4 systems I have ever installed it on.

My client shows between 1 and 2 GB RAM (depending upon what I'm doing) consistently - usually closer to the 1 GB mark. So I suspect yes.

[Singular]

Mine's always around 1-1.2 gigs. It starts off at around 900 mgs and then just works its way up.

[Qnevven]

Is the client supposed to use up over 1GB of RAM while being played? I watch my system resources throughout the day because I run a lot of RAM intensive programs while 'working' and playing. The DDO client is always at the top of the resource list and consistently uses around 1GB of RAM. Is this typical or is there something wrong with my client? I will say that it has done this on all 4 systems I have ever installed it on.

Not sure if it's hardware related (i've allways suspected that AMD CPUs perform much worse with DDO in that matter) - but the size of RAM that is used by the game depends on how many times you have relogged.

If i start the game and only log one character - i will usually see 700-800mb of ram, that changes every time i relog. 1 relog increase the size to around 1.2gb and so on... after several relogs the game sits on over 2gb of ram.
Also - each time i relog it reduces the game performance GREATLY. With a single reload i can still play more or less normally - but everything more than that makes the game run so slow... even running through public areas, opening UI windows or accessing bank takes forever - on extreeme situations running through marketplace seems like a slideshow.

Like i've said - i do not know if it's hardware (cpu/chipset) related or not - but it seems that the game doesn't release the resources that were used upon loging out and onto another character properly.

As a rule - if i am doing quests i try to get a fresh client restart when changing toons so that i can get max performance... and when i'm just reloging to get items, decraft, AH on different characters and otherwise account maintenance activities i let myself relog 3-4 times before the game becomes unbearable with FPS below 10 and i have to restart client as well.