Looking for a solution to a movement lag problem of mine

[alcapone]

Heya,

I've started noticing a weird sort of movement/animation lag occuring mainly when after flying between FPs. While framerates stay at their usual highs on the slaves and on the main, the follow and direction change animations in particular will be extremely choppy. The slaves will end up following on the side or even in front of the main. Usually when staying in the zone the lag disappears after a while. A quick relog completely fixes it as well. Since it only started happening in the Lich KIng zones, i'm starting to suspect this might have a hardware cause somewhere.

Specs atm are:

q9550, 4gb ram, vista 64 for slaves

and a x2 6000 with 2Gb ram, win xp for main

both systems are running 4850s vid cards

WoW folders are symlinked. Tried lowering all settings with no effect.

When the problem occurs, cpu usage (for any of the cores) is hovering in the 30%s, ram use around 70%, do not see any hard drive activity either...

I've made a little video that hopefully demonstrates my problem (sorry for poor quality, just started experimenting with youtube)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwUo2Ao2wFc



Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong or what's happening in here?

[sqeaky4100]

To me that looks more like an internet/lag problem, and not hardware related.

Every now and then my Slaves will act the same way. They'll appear to be INFRONT of my main for a sec and then teleport back to where they "should be" right behind my main.

From what I can tell from my problems, and your video... that's not a hardware problem at all.

That said, no idea how to fix it :(

[Aldercy]

What you’re seeing there is simply lag between the wow clients and server. You need to be aware that your clients are constantly updating the server with movement information; the server will then send instructions to each of your clients telling them to update the movement of each character on screen. In order to make this appear smooth the client is allowed to continue to draw the movement of a character even when the server is not instructing it to if it received a prior movement command and has not been instructed to stop; you may notice this sometimes when one of your characters appear to run past your group and then snap back into place. In your case the client you were watching had been instructed to move the characters on screen in a certain direction, but then as it does it is updated with a delayed command that tells it to turn the characters, however that turn occurred back some distance so it snaps them back and does the turn. This behavior continues to happen until the information starts to arrive in a timely manner again.

This may well be out of your hands, it could be caused by any number of issues between your system and the Blizzard servers. If you only experience this sometimes it is likely that your connection is capable of handling it, but you may want to take note of the time of day that it occurs; if you’re in an apartment complex it could be that more people are online and saturating the limited bandwidth. It could also be something on your PC starting up and using the network connection. There are a lot of reasons this could happen but most are out of your control.

This is ultimately a very watered down explanation, there's a lot more involved and understanding it fully requires a deep understanding of internet protocols and how the game client and server interact.

- Aldercy

[alcapone]

Thank you for the replies! At the least this will save me from more trips to the computer store, blindly upgrading components in hope of improvement. I'll focus my attention on the networking side of things, see what i can find.

[PerzianPenguin]

How to increase your internet connection speed for wow. (a better way) ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=21466')


This may help you.
Give it ago.
I had a similar problem to you.
With movement lag, but followed by intense DCs'.

So check out my fix.

[sqeaky4100]

How to increase your internet connection speed for wow. (a better way) ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=21466')


This may help you.
Give it ago.
I had a similar problem to you.
With movement lag, but followed by intense DCs'.

So check out my fix.
This seems like a good method, also make sure to use the method he explain in like 1 sentence. ( About the TCKDelay or w/e it's called ) that's a great way to decrease ping.

Lastly, hardware MIGHT solve your problem actually. I would look into one of THESE ('http://www.evga.com/products/moreinfo.asp?pn=128-P2-KN01-TR'), they are coming out this week, and supposedly they really keep thing "Steady" while playing WoW, which is what you need.

[Aldercy]

Yes and no, it really depends on how his configuration is setup. If your running a true hardware setup (one WoW client per machine) then the Bigfoot Killer NICs wont really do anything for you unless the systems you have are hugely under spec, and then I would advise spending the money on some hardware upgrades that would far increase performance overall. If on the other hand you are running multiple instances of the WoW client on one machine then these NICs could be of use as they off load network processing from the CPU to their own NPU which will provide a small increase in network and computer performance.

I actually run two slave machines with two WoW clients per and I have Bigfoot Killer NICs in both. Both slaves are duel core with 8 gig of ram and symlinked data and interface directories, but I did notice a 20ms avg drop in ping after installing the Killer NICs. Having said that I do on rare occasions experience this very issue. These NICs are not going to fix issues to do with the network between your systems and the Blizzard servers.

As for the registry tweaking idea; I would take any such suggestion with a grain of salt. If your really concerned about it go into your router settings and disable QoS, or WMM as its known on some newer routers. Frankly its a security hole in some situations and due to its implementation requires applications to specifically trigger it so your likely getting no benefit from having it active anyway.

- Aldercy

EDIT: Just to note I only run the Killer NICs in my slave systems; my main rig which runs only one WoW client has a regular gigabit NIC in it and is perfectly stable. Also on board NICs tend to use the CPU for network processing, so even a standard PCI NIC could see some small improvement compared to on board.

EDIT 2: I also want to point out how stupid it is to download any script file from an unknown source, especially when posted on a World of Warcraft related forum. If I wanted to get a key logger into your system this is exactly the approach I would take.

[thinus]

This is not a Northrend issue, I've had it happen to my team and I haven't been to Outland or Northrend yet. It is infrequent enough that it hasn't bothered me too much yet.

[Aldercy]

This is not a Northrend issue, I've had it happen to my team and I haven't been to Outland or Northrend yet. It is infrequent enough that it hasn't bothered me too much yet.Who said anything about it being a Northrend issue? But your right that its not localized to Northrend, our Outland even. I've seen this issue arise in vanilla WoW too.

[thinus]

This is not a Northrend issue, I've had it happen to my team and I haven't been to Outland or Northrend yet. It is infrequent enough that it hasn't bothered me too much yet.Who said anything about it being a Northrend issue?

The OP did.

[alcapone]

Btw, as a little update, I have done the TCPAck reghack on both machines (the latency trick ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=24924&highlight=latency+trick#post24924')) and (in game displayed) latency dropped from high 200s to low 100s now. At the cost of half my bandwidth, but i can live with that. However even that drop didnt do anything for the problem. ;(