The latest on lag and game performance improvements

[Atheok]

Here we go again...

Queue the flood of "lag is so much better" posts. Well, of course it is. The servers were just rebooted, any memory leaks have been reset, database cache has been cleared and the active player load is at a low point. Of course the lag is better.

We've seen cycle multiple times over the past 2.5 months. Every time, the severity of the lag slowly builds until it hits the severe and gameplay impacting point around the 1-2 weeks of uptime mark. I know it's a crazy idea, but how about we hold off on claiming things are fixed or even significantly better until the two week mark?

It's why I didn't want to rush into make any comments. But looking back to last week's restart of servers, this is what I said then:

12 men hard L.Shroud, renown lag was again in place. Maybe not as annoying like it has been over the last few weeks, but once in a while would still get a 1-2 secs short freezes.

And this was just the day after the update. Anyways, I don't know how many of you actually focused the lag we experienced through guild renown being awarded, I did. It was easy to miss either way, I don't blame anyone. Let me just tell you it felt like 90% of the lag in the game was related to that. And while I made that early statement a week ago after a server reset, today after 12h of constant 11 men, 12 men raiding, I didn't see any of that. Zero.
Now, I'm not an IT guy, I don't have a clue what's happening in the background, I can only make remarks that are visible to me at the surface. And so far there's no lag through guild renown. That doesn't mean the game is completely lag free. But that 90% is off. And it's different than previous server resets.

[Silverleafeon]

Tested:

Khyber
12 man
LN
11~midnight Central time
SE USA
Fighter Kensei build with fast healing in US

Polled group after finish:
Zero Renown type lag

Observed:
Typical approaching chest lag as per heroic shroud
Sigular lag for 1 second, could not identify in part 1
Could not observe typical victory lag with objective completions though not 100% sure.
Did not have dangerous lieutenant lag in part 2, did kill twice to get crystal (no hurl/EiN/manyshotter)

Overall, very smooth enjoyable run.


PS thanks for the extra 20 melee power on my kensei (went from 118 to 138)



;;;;


CitW EH, full group, joined late.
No observable lag, except, 1 second lag during talking to Anna for Raid completion, was jumping at the time and hung in air.


;;;

Leg Elite Tempest Spine
1 am
full group including warlock and tree build
no discernable renown lag
no discernable victory lag
don't remember much if any other lag, very enjoyable raid


;;;;

Leg Hard Hound
2 am
full group including tree build
no discernable renown lag
no discernable victory lag
no raid completion lag
no lag remembered


;;;;

LH Shroud
7 am
full group with 2 warlocks
no discernable renown lag
1 second lag upon raid completion
typical chest lag in part 1
1 second of random lag
otherwise extremely smooth
no lieutenant lag

[Loromir]

Not necessarily lag....but I was getting very slow loads when moving between instances last night. Much slower than normal for me.

[DagazUlf]

Perhaps the servers could be restarted weekly as well?

That's what my guildies and I have been wondering. If there was simply a scheduled weekly server reboot that would prevent the lag from escalating, players could just work around it.

[AnEvenNewerNoob]

That's what my guildies and I have been wondering. If there was simply a scheduled weekly server reboot that would prevent the lag from escalating, players could just work around it.

I would like to see this too. It's only anecdotal evidence, but it's a LOT of anecdotal evidence that suggests lag is not as bad and gradually gets worse after a server restart. (memory leak)

Please consider this. Maybe every wed morning or something.

And here's an idea, don't restart one of them and let them be guinea pigs and see if you get more lag reports from them. Don't tell us which server so it's not a placebo effect.

[Silverleafeon]

Please consider this. Maybe every wed morning or something.

This is what Wizard of the Coast does for their flagship, Magic the Gathering, every Wednesday morning they shut it down from 9 am to noon, then restart it.
I recommended the same for DDO on and off for years.

Perhaps there is a strong reason not to do such?
Any thoughts Cordovan?

[Franghasea]

Greetings!

Post Patch 31.1, we 11 manned LH Shroud with minimal lag spikes. There did not seem to be any lag related to chest renown. Related or not, we also did not have any lag with the kobold spawns after part 1 or part 3, and no lag after taking down the four bosses in part 2, that otherwise sometimes inhibits eliminating the crystal. That was am unexpected and pleasant surprise.

Franghasea

[Ebondevil]

1. Server: Khyber
2. Approximate time: 10:30pm GMT
3. General class makeup and group composition: Favoured Soul 20/epic 2, Onyx Panther 20, Owlbear 17, Artificer 20/epic 2
4. Size of party/raid group: 2 +4 hires +1 Iron defender
5. Quest or raid run: Spies in the House Epic Hard
6. General experience: Was mostly smooth, Surprisingly Fast load times when traveling around Eberron, through the crafting Hall, until I reached the red named caster Rowan Watzun at around 10:30pm GMT, then both clients started lagging badly causing the death of the Favoured Soul and his two Hires, my Artificer Valiantly attempted a rescue, defeated Rowan with minimal lag, only to lag solid for ~30sec and get slaughtered by the apprentices, archers and Animated Armours. The lag continued on both clients even after party wipe, and Loading times suffered greatly as well.

Edit: It should be Noted that the client is not closing smoothly either after a /quit taking upwards of 10 minutes to shut down, Happens whether the computer is left to do nothing, or while the computer is running other games smoothly.

Edit 2: Took about 45-50 Minutes to close.

[KoobTheProud]

The lag comes and goes on a regular basis. The first day after a reboot can be fairly smooth and then the next day it's back to interface lag, which is the only kind I really see since I do not group at all.

I'm playing about 1/10 as much as I was prior to the data center move. I hop servers looking for one that seems to have relatively little lag. I'm still often frustrated by mobs not being where they should be and moves that don't work because a mob right in front of me is "out of range" or because my facing is wrong despite the fact I am facing the mob.

Right now DDO can be a fun experience from time to time but more often it is a mess, even from a solo perspective. The game really is not particularly enjoyable when the client is laggy. It was a good game to play that some people chose to use like a rat race before. Now it is often not a good game to play.

[UurlockYgmeov]

much better.

Fri @ 5 livestream DoJ with full party (12). PUG-LFM.

first try was LH - and was very smooth except for center-aggro-lag. Was a party wipe (darn healer (meaning Uurlock) just couldn't keep up).

second try was LN - and was very smooth - right through to the end. some lag spikes, but for my first time ever in DoJ, and hearing nothing but infamous lagmonster tales.... very pleased.

Note: Monster Manual seems to cause lag spikes, but renown was just cranking along lag-free(ish)

[Elfishski]

Just ran some PUG raids on Khyber:
EE Deathwyrm: no lag problems that caused any hassles. A bunch of people inexplicably died in red light/green light while standing still but more "glitchy" than "laggy" I'd say, and a couple of brief stutters in end fight. Mostly really smooth and easy to complete.

EE Thunder on Fire Peaks: didn't notice any problems. Fantastic.

EE DOJ (1st try): major lag when the ambush spawned for a few seconds, then smooth enough, but we failed because of awkward center archons, poor communication and a slight lack of DPS (which served us right)

EE DOJ (2nd try): major lag when the ambush spawned, worse than the first time and most of the group died, then smooth enough all the way to the end, where we finished just fine having improved our coordination. Just one more small lag spike on completion where most died again to a last spiteful bombardment.

So there's still some room for improvement, and it's not long since the server restart so there could be the usual deterioration in performance, but so far I'd say well done, this is a huge improvement in the experience!

The raids were really *fun*, not an exercise in frustration as they have been.

[MistaMagic]

Khyber

LH 12man Shroud

Lag - NONE

Time: Approx 30 mins ago from time stamp

[DagazUlf]

Legendary Hound on Friday night, right about the time the large beholders spawn, the entire instance just went into lock-down. Movement and actions became impossible other than an occasional stutter-step every minute or so.

With a lot of luck we struggled through the lag and eventually got a completion, only to find our chests were full of Heroic level named loot:

https://goo.gl/photos/LQM9vcgF1Afx6wWM9

https://goo.gl/photos/cQMrNMKM6xvyrKE2A

Super not fun.

[maddong]

Overall the lag is significantly better than 2 months ago. The game is fun to play again. Thank you for your hard work and dedication, Devs!

Maybe if you can fix the DOJ lag people are still talking about it will squash what remainder of lag there is in the game? It may be a good focus point....

[Mindos]

It seems to me that there is lag whenever a large group of mobs spawn and cannot directly see the player characters. For example, almost any 3 dimensional map, with players higher or lower then mobs, causes lag. Or hound, where its 2D but mobs have multiple paths (since its a circle basically.) With pillars blocking the center.

We've seen some other database problems lately with guild reknown, and I wonder how mob pathing is done at DDO. It would have to be a temp database of some kind, and seeing how mob behavior changes so often, and degrades sometimes, we can deduce some answers.

I wonder if there's a mob pathing routine that runs that doesn't have write permissions, thus stalling the server for a split second until some default pathing is loaded. Maybe a database admin could be temp contracted, it might be money well spent?

[KnarlWood]

My husband and I ran several in Eveningstar (Sarlona) with some rubberbanding. Got killed a couple of times due to heals not going through due to lag. Monsters not dying until 4 or 5 seconds after they should. Mobs made it a lot worse. These were level 20 toons. We played Saturday and Sunday with the same results. My husband said rubberbanding was really bad this morning about 5:30 CDT on Eveningstar.

[Vanhooger]

Haven't played much for a while, but I was back playing this weekend, and I was finally impressed to run Legendary hard-elite raid and NO LAG at all. The only lag I found is when we complete an objective and the is a freeze of 2 sec, it would be nice if you could solve that too. Renown lag is gone too. Haven't run doj yet, but I saw many EH and EE run over the weekend so I guess the lag has been fixed or at least toned down a lot. Well done, my only complain is that it took too long to fix and many people has left the game, some friend too.

[Micki]

In my experience, since the server move.. any time I cast an aoe as a spell caster, or I on my monkcher aggro a bunch of mobs and run, I have these momentary freezes, where I'm just stopped in my step, running in place, before it releases again.

If you look at my fot video, at 14 min 5 s I run in place for a whole second. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIsW...utu.be&t=14m4s
At 14:31 is another one https://youtu.be/aIsWEa3b23Q?t=14m30s

I don't remember experiencing these kind of temp freezes before the server move. Now this happens all the time when I'm fighting mobs. Sometimes it's longer than a second.

[Xgya]

I won't have that much information, but I'll still chime in.

I only play on Khyber, and almost never get to raid, so the raiding issues are entirely nil to me.
In fact, as far as gameplay lag goes, all of the issues I had after the server merge are now entirely and (almost) completely gone. Though I will name that one hilarious issue where Coyle was left standing up after being "killed". (this happened as I was soloing the quest, yesterday evening)

There is, however, still one lag issue I'd like to see fixed (or, if anyone here would be knowledgeable enough to tell me if they fixed it themselves)

Nothing game-breaking, but deconstructing items very often forces me to close the UI and open it again when I need to deconstruct multiple items (not doing so makes it so the dragged item never gets placed from my inventory to the crafting UI).
I comment on this thread about lag because when it happens, the delay between clicking the "deconstruct" button and the actual deconstruction is always longer, so I assume it could be related, at least partially, to server lag. It could happen before the server change, but nowhere nearly as consistently (to the point where I do not even try to deconstruct two items without closing the UI and opening it again nowadays).
Seeing as this happens on three different machines and two different internet connections, I am loathe to report this as an installation issue.

I know this isn't the first time the problem has been reported, but my Google-fu doesn't seem to find solutions.

[Ebondevil]

I won't have that much information, but I'll still chime in.

I only play on Khyber, and almost never get to raid, so the raiding issues are entirely nil to me.
In fact, as far as gameplay lag goes, all of the issues I had after the server merge are now entirely and (almost) completely gone. Though I will name that one hilarious issue where Coyle was left standing up after being "killed". (this happened as I was soloing the quest, yesterday evening)

There is, however, still one lag issue I'd like to see fixed (or, if anyone here would be knowledgeable enough to tell me if they fixed it themselves)

Nothing game-breaking, but deconstructing items very often forces me to close the UI and open it again when I need to deconstruct multiple items (not doing so makes it so the dragged item never gets placed from my inventory to the crafting UI).
I comment on this thread about lag because when it happens, the delay between clicking the "deconstruct" button and the actual deconstruction is always longer, so I assume it could be related, at least partially, to server lag. It could happen before the server change, but nowhere nearly as consistently (to the point where I do not even try to deconstruct two items without closing the UI and opening it again nowadays).
Seeing as this happens on three different machines and two different internet connections, I am loathe to report this as an installation issue.

I know this isn't the first time the problem has been reported, but my Google-fu doesn't seem to find solutions.

There's a thread about Cannith Crafting, and one of the concerns is the issues with Deconning as you describe.

Not sure if it helps but I find not moving the Mouse at all, after clicking the Decon button helps a little bit, can almost guarantee there will be lag if I try to hover over an item to see the tooltip info after clicking but before completion of the Deconning. I also find if I change the type of Deconning (Enhancement, Item Prep, Prefix, Suffix) then that will also result in lag. Get lag even without sometimes, but the above tend to make it worse.