Lag Scale

CrisGer · **Posted:** Sun Feb 14, 2010 8:03 pm

I am trying to develop an infornal Lag Scale to help describe to Support the current state of the Cavern.

MOUL2 Lag Scale 1.0
Feb 2010

1. No Lag Perfect flow Globally
2. Some Lag, Intermittent, not more often than 2 minutes or so, short duration
3. More Frequent, But only in heavily Trafficed Areas lilke the City or Ages with lots of animation (Gahreesen)
4. Often and freqent, say every 10 steps of avatar or lasting more than a second..ie a real freeze, may include CTD's
5. Heavy Weather, very laggy, swimming in Lag. May include CTDs, Stack Dumps or other player system impact.

Response may vary depending on connectivity, individual system resources and other factors.

This Scale is a work in progress, all suggestions welcome.

Mac_Fife · **Posted:** Sun Feb 14, 2010 9:05 pm

Good idea Cris.

There is a distinct lag whenever some links into the age you're in, so "busy" doesn't always mean "laggy" if the population is relatively stable, although lag and population count are related.

The other thing I've noticed, and this may well be more down to my elderly PC, is that whenever I first start the game I get a fair bit of lag; this fades away through the course of maybe five minutes. The way my HD lamp flickers gives me the impression that some local data is being refreshed or more likely that my AV is scanning the game files as they get requested. Actually, that makes a lot of sense now that I think about it, because I see something similar happen whenever I move to a new age.

CrisGer · **Posted:** Sun Feb 14, 2010 9:44 pm

Yes i am taking that into account Mac, agreed on the Start up data synch time...esp in the city. We may have to add some numbers to the scale to give it more detail, for now, this is a raw data first attempt. I am trying it on for size and working with support as i have had tickets today and yesterday refining the lag changes. Yesterday was better, last night was better than the day and today is worse than both, or equal to during the day yesterday but not consistently.

It varies, ...and is interesting to track.

any suggestions from anyone most welcome. we are in this together and our shared fun and happiness is our goal.

sure is nice to have steady and fast response from support, they are defenitly on the ball.

JanB · **Posted:** Sun Feb 14, 2010 10:13 pm

Only Lag? I noticed several CTD's yesterday and today especially when linking and noticed the overall performance is a little bumpy also when the load is getting higher.

Mac_Fife · **Posted:** Sun Feb 14, 2010 11:06 pm

I guess that when you "measure" lag you also need to correlate this to time of day, either local time or cavern time. The total number of players at any given moment may be a factor, and as players, we only have any idea of the players we can see on our lists. I don't know if Cyan can even determine a player count retrospectively: I'm sure they can tell how many players are currently on-line, but can they figure out how many were on-line yesterday at 3 PM

CrisGer · **Posted:** Mon Feb 15, 2010 12:09 am

yep Jan and i included the possiblity of CTDs in stage 4 and 5 of the scale...i had 2 CTDs today so far, and 2 yesterday

JanB · **Posted:** Tue Feb 16, 2010 5:06 am

I had 4 yesterday evening ( for me) they occured when linking. B.E Minkata > Bahro Cave after having completed the symbol ( With avi JanB2). So the swiching between module seems to be vunerable whan the load is higher on the servers.
Might be a tuning issue?

Mac_Fife · **Posted:** Tue Feb 16, 2010 6:06 pm

There's something not quite "squaring" here...

I can get quite bad lag at times, and that can occur in solo ages so it's clearly tied to server load issues as I didn't get that (well not nearly as badly) before the game went open. I've always had some "client side" lag, because this PC I'm using isn't the fastest thing around by a long way. But, I have not had a single CTD right through the entire time, nor ever during MQO. I got a Net 6 when the servers went down on "Opening Monday", and I had another during the MQO closing day photo shoot. Twice in recent days I've "linked to the black age" and had to Alt-F4 out, but in both cases I'd toggled to my desktop and back to full screen during a link. Since minimising Uru during a link has always been known to delay a link from completing, I can't really say the problem was unexpected.

My point is that while CTDs may well be more likely at the busiest times, something else must be making CTDs possible in the first place. Root Cause Analysis - figure out why CTDs happen at all and then you don't need to worry about why they're more likely when it's busy. But I'm not suggesting that's a trivial task

.

JanB · **Posted:** Tue Feb 16, 2010 8:11 pm

Net 6 err I had too when the servers went down.
I've seen a few more since too.
CTDs during linking most of the time happn when the next object needs to be loaded (rotating symbol dark new rotating symbol)
Sometimes it stops ( a still). Wait a few minutes. After taskmanageryou simply get an execution has stopped.
I recently set compatibility mode XP Sp2. Same result.
Ik wil check the eventlogs to look for a clue.

gimlet · **Posted:** Tue Feb 16, 2010 9:34 pm

Mac_Fife wrote:

... Twice in recent days I've "linked to the black age" and had to Alt-F4 out, but in both cases I'd toggled to my desktop and back to full screen during a link.

I got the same after walking through the Tetsunot portal - and I had not done anything wierd in task switching at all. Ah, the joys of ancient unfixed bugs ...

CrisGer · **Posted:** Wed Feb 17, 2010 7:03 pm

CTDs have happened for me when linking back to Relto and when leaving the Bahro caves. I agree Mac it is odd, and seems unconnected directly to traffic. Not sure yet but a good thing for us to look for as much as possible. I wish they were stack dumps with code..but unless they turn the dumplog function back on the best we can do is gather raw data i suppose.

Lag Scale

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