Need More Information: Lag

For those of you reporting in game lag I have a few questions:

1) Are you experiencing server lag such as delays in chat, finishing actions, moving items around your inventory, seeing other players skip around and so on?

2) Can you determine a cause of lag? Does terraforming appear to cause lag?

3) If you are experiencing lag, does this seem to occur in regular spikes (such as every 5 minutes)? Or does it occur randomly? Or does it occur constantly?

4) When you experience lag, do all players nearby seem to experience the same amount of lag, or are you experiencing different lags?

I at first thought I was experiencing something along the lines of a out-dated or corrupted download.

I got in the the other day, and found that my ping to the server was over 1.3k, I lag heavily to the point the launcher will either stop responding, lag to a closure (crash) and other things.

I got playing with Windows 7 options to no help, which doesn't surprise me as it seems that that ping is a huge problem.

For me while in game, the only thing I could do is open menus, move around, no craft or typing was even possible for the 10minutes (give or take) I was in game.

This message has been emailed in as well.

Greetings Jooky,

I was in game with two machines, one of them pretty old with only 1G ;) but with a good graphics card though.
The chatlag we recognized was randomly on both machines, we for ourselves did not terraform nor did we anything, just wrote.

What I found interesting is, that the older machine had a ping-time varying from 200ms up to 600ms (the fast one 200ms and lower). Actions between those two (f.e. trading) always went as fast as the slower one could handle it. That means, that the faster machine is slowed down via the possibility of the slower to answer.

I guess there is an issue with the priority of things to respond to. Due to the performance of the old machine this one is not able to build all details and graphics etc, that's pretty okay. But what should be handled as soon as possible are transactions with others or changes in the game (like terraforming) so that the fast client is 'free' again and has not to wait until the slow one tells: okay, I'm ready now. ;) I had f.e. the following situation:
- trading was initiated by the fast client
- trading request was shown and slow one accepted
- handle over one thing from slow to fast
- fast client showed it (the one receiving), slow one not in his own window!
- trading was canceled by the fast client
- nothing happened on both machines
- trading was canceled again - nothing happened - etc pp
- after around 1 minute all cancels suddenly worked and they where shown in sequentially order on the slow client

This is not very precise I know because of missing informations and debugging tools, it should just mirror my impressions. :)

Cheers.

Very interesting Snake! This is exactly the type of information I'm looking for.

It sounds like the server got stuck trying to send the transaction message to your slow client and this lagged the server.

Can you repeat this test with the same results? Or does this happen only sometimes?

So then, Virtus was so friendly to help testing.
It's reproducable yes.
The slow client does trading very laggy, even for the other one.
If I try to trade from my fast one it takes around 16seconds until the slow one shows the question.
If I transfer a fish that lasts 60 seconds to show there!

What it not does obviously is producing a common lag for other players, only for the partners.
What is very weird though is that every thing that is happening occurs very very late on the slow client.
Virtus killed f.e. the slow one, I could see this instantly on my fast one, but it lasted nearly one minute on the slow client to 'arrive'. Ping times there varied from 400, 600 to over 1500ms.

PS: Virtus you should think about your combat strategy :P

If you trade from the slow to the fast client, the fast client gets the item right away, correct?

So this sounds like the server is trying to send information to the slow client and gets stuck resending the information.

I can't see how a slower system would be causing this lag, because actual processing of these commands (like turning on an icon for the trade window) is very quick.

Are you running different software, such as an antivirus, on the 'slow' machine? Is there something different with your connection (are both machines connected to the same router? Is one one wireless while the other is directly plugged in?)

I've seen this too seem like the server gets a lot of re-request for failed packets due to slow speeds so far my guesses are

1)antivirus,firewall or router
2)streaming media i.e movies will cause allot of crc check fails (i dont know why)

1.) No firewall activated
2.) it's my testpc - it even hasn't an antivirus-program ^^
3.) same router, connected via winchester, 100MBit/sec on both.
4.) intel celeron with 2.8GHz / 1G, idle load for the machine is 0% / 270MB
5.) there are only 30 standard-win-processes loaded at this stage.
6.) the main differences between the systems are, that the slow one runs XP (Vista64 here), the fast one is an AMD dual core (pretty old two I know ;) but good enough so fare) and the graphics cards are, old one: ATI 3600er series/512 - btw pretty dark at night ;), fast client: nvdida gforce 9500gs/512 - much more light hehe.

7.) bandwidth tests:
If I run a download from my own rootserver to the slow client with FileZilla I get a transfer-speed of 1.4MB/sec so around 9 MBit/sec what nearly uses the via the router possible bandwidth of 16Mbit/sec. Same try with fast client: same bandwidth - it's clearly limited by the bandwidth of the rootserver. Parallel load with both clients: 670KByte/sec each one.

And yes, transfering from slow to fast shows it instantly at the destination.
PS: I do not need to play with the old client, just to tell, it's just for testing what perhaps produces a poor performance :)