Was hoping to get some more information from players and/or DMs about an increase in lag they might have experienced in the past week. Also please mention times you experience this lag and your general geographic location.
I'm on the East Coast in the US and am about 3 miles away from the server. The lag is consistent in spurts every few mins. Opening inventory can take six seconds or more, and in combat 2-3 actions can go by during a "pause" of lag.
There are times these bursts of lag are really bad, and I thought it was attributed to multiple DMs on at once, but then I tried to play with no DMs on and only 12 players. Lag was still there.
Any thoughts or comments are welcome!
I'm located in Scandinavia, and I'm experiencing similiar lag bouts; delay of texts and opening inventory. Has been especially prominent these last two weeks.
Indications of when this started are much appreciated.
I've noticed it for a couple of weeks but I'm not real sure when exactly it started. It gets exponentially worse when groups are out questing, especially when they are doing some of the larger quests with more spawns or different waves of spawns.
As Conan mentioned, the inventory lag shows up and conversations with NPCs are a big hassle. If you happen to be involved with the quest you'll often see the "run through" effect on the creatures where they run beyond players or barricades for a moment before teleporting back.
This happened a while ago and I believe Mort went through and trimmed off a ton of the wandering and extra NPCs in the module and it seemed to fix it for a little while at least.
This started for me earlier this week, I usually get a lag spike lasting up to 3 seconds (rarely longer) once every 30 seconds or so, when it's bad. When it's good, I notice not many people are logging in and out, constantly, but maybe it's just coincidence. I'll watch for it today to see what's going on as it happens and post more with what I see. From what I can tell, it happens in every zone, as I've seen it on the Ziggurat, alleyways, docks, harpies quest, and even orcs quest.
For the last few days it has been laggy as described by the op for me, though today seems fine.
Yeah, surprisingly, today I've not had any lag.
This morning was horrible lag
Earlier this week, 3-4 days ago. It comes in bursts lasting about half a minute, before it subsides almost entirely for hours at a time (to me at least).
West Coast, started this week monday ish..been near death causing at times..so far not. But it has been the full range, of ..warping, no enemies, surrounded by six, click a pot, nothing happens til long after, text conversations with npc takeing forever to load, and pulling up inventories sometimes takes a few minutes.
I noticed it this week. I live in Finland. I'm not talking about a little delay here: literally up to a minute of lag prevented me from moving out of a quest area before it passed. This lasted for some ten minutes at its worse and then just disappeared. I've also had trouble logging in, getting the timed out message. Meanwhile, other players seemed to do just fine, so it could have to do with me. My connection was fine otherwise, though, and I had no trouble connecting to GameSpy.
There's also been lag spikes experienced by several players, even right after a reset at Euro afternoons. I can't say when exactly it started, but I agree with "this last week."
Only the small text lags here, but nothing bigger that would've troubled my playing.
Finland here as well.
Definatly at the beginning of this week.
I've experienced this as well, and can confirm that it's very sporadic.
I was having a good bit of trouble with this last thursday evening, for one.
Thought the lag was just me.
Chicagoland area here. I've had the gambit of what was mentioned above. Last week during a DM run event in the Docks, it was so bad I could not target the 'bad guys'. I spent half the time running around trying to find them, would finally find them then lag out so bad that I lost them again. (I spend most of my play time in the docks, which is always a little laggy, but has been much worse of late.)
conversations are slow, like taking up to three seconds to show after hitting enter. Opening inventory can take up to six seconds. I just plan try not to have conversations with NPC's. Thankfully I've never had to hit a transition or open a door quickly as those are taking the longest for me.
Lag during large events is to be expected, but if performance is really that bad for numerous players during normal play that is unacceptable. Our hosting service is very expensive and generally we have an efficient (if enormous) module.
So I suspect something is going wrong somewhere.
Please try and pay attention to this over the next few day.
Right now the server ping is -1, whereas most other servers are between 75 - 300 ping.
I'm West Coast.
Shortly after I began trying out the new alchemy system the whole server began experiencing serious lag and many people lagged out. I used a few minor potions, some purple crystal chunks, rat meat, reptile scales, sinew and guts in my experiments.
Is it fine during some parts of the day but bad during others? Are there any EU people running into this problem?
Like said, Finland here and I'm running smoothly. Only occasional text lags but hey, aren't they normal once in a while. I have not seen anything unordinary.
Here Here! Definatly lag since last update (or revert to old version, whatever happened) imo. Basically since the server had its crashing weekend (Sat a week or so ago maybe) there has been noticiable lag.
I'd say I started noticing it about oh 2 weeks ago. Lag spikes that almost seem repetitive, every 15-25 seconds I would get nailed by horrendous lag that often resulted in me simply logging out to avoid say running into something and dying. Sometimes moving would take up to 6-7 seconds, and there has been an extremely noticeable increase in transition load times. My normal time with my connection /pc is 3-5 seconds, its started to take up to in a few really bad cases 20-25 seconds to load, on average at least triple my normal load times. Just came back after being away for the weekend and as soon as I logged in it was back. To be clear, until twoish weeks ago I had never seen an ounce of lag on the server.
I also want to note that in the last couple days there has been a lot of error messages showing up in the server message window. Usually related to someone taking quests. I'll post the exact error message when I see it again.
Yeah, the lag has been really bad the last few days. Even walking I get lag. During fights, it hops about a lot. I know it's not my computer because other server don't lag so badly, even with huge maps laid out. I'm not sure why it's gotten so bad lately.
SB
The lag has gotten bad enough of late, that I just plain refuse to quest.
And yes, I know that during large DM events the lag is usually bad, but I've never had it so that I couldn't see the enemies to hit them, usually I just don't get the chance to. heh
The reason this issue became so pressing for me was that the lag was persistent even with less than 10 players logged in and no DM present. I was asking about player locations because I was curious if the isse was more related to the paths that players connect to the server through, but after running a tracert, couldn't find any bad hops.
Will continue to monitor the connection as much as I can though.
I'm very interesting in the time of day this is happening at. Exact times would be very good.
Can you folks put up locations? I am curious if all you are US and from certain areas or what not.
Because I as euro guy can't find it and it's clear you folks have major issues there. Maybe the server provider did something? DId your connections change during the recent storms? Something has changed recently somewhere, but I've had mine to stay same.
Maybe major connection provider in US is screwing up something?
I'm US East Coast and I play mostly EST evenings. Generally between 6pm and 12am. The lag is pretty consistent at these times, but I will also mention that if I'm up early on say a Sat. morning with 6 Euro players or something, I still recall there being an issue.
I'm within 3-5 miles of the server (unless the location changed sometime in the last few months), so ping is usually 15-30.
Well it's not consistent lag as if the ping is high. It's fits and starts where everything seems fine, then you wind up waiting several seconds to open a door, or for text you've typed to show up. From what I'm seeing it's like this all times of the day, and how many people are online doesn't seem to matter all that much. The only time I see it change is when there's a big DM event like an invasion, but that's always going to be the case.
I hadn't noticed it at all untill today. between the hours of 4pm GMT and 6pm GMT I was lagging on and off. When I attempted to quest. The lag was so bad, on an off every 20 seconds or so.
I am a UK player. While I expect lag every so often, today was equal to that of the lag i'd expect during a ziggurat invasion with the whole of the world there.
It seems pretty random, I have been on all hours of the day last two days due to work stoppage irl, and it is consistently bad lag. Questing, conversations, transitions. Then, mysteriously, there will be lag free times. They do not last long. (the lag free times)
I have to say, today even I've seen the lag. It's around every couple minutes, a small freezing.
Quote from: Equinox;200445between the hours of 4pm GMT and 6pm GMT I was lagging on and off
Thank you. This is closer to what I mean by exact time.
It would be amazing if somebody could report exactly whey they run into some of these spikes. Something like, "it just lagged 10 minutes ago at 5:23 pm GMT."
Happening now at 12:30 PM GMT -7 in a pretty bad way. 2-5 second delays, errors on clients entering as well. (Leged, to be specific)
Experiencing lag right now. 1:27pm EST. 18 players online, no DMs.
Trying to move things in my inventory, takes 3-5 seconds for an item to move.
Is it possible to determine your ping to the server while in game? I would like to see if there are any consistent spikes in ping.
So some udpated information: Been playing around with all kinds of different things. Checked to see if my AVG was messing with NWN, but that turned out to be a No.
However I did notice something peculiar. People have been saying for a while now that you can't see EFU's server on gamespy in the PW Story channel, though you can still see the server status in your history or your favorites list. The peculiar thing I noticed is that normally just clicking once on the server listing will refresh the ping of the server listed there. However, in EFU's case, this does not happen.
I went to several other servers and just logged in and out, then I checked to see if I could get their pings to refresh. All of them did, except EFU.
Eventually EFU would refresh but this would take a while. And a few times, the server would show up as being offline in my history listing, even though it was still up and running. After a few moments it would reappear and have -1 as a ping before things settled down and I could see the normal ping numbers again.
Oh, I know why it can't be seen in gamespy. Grr
There's been a noticeable amount of lag in the past 3 hours.
Sunday, 26 Sep, 12:00 AM to 3:00 AM EST
8:45 am EST the server is showing a considerable amount of lag. Spurts that last 3-5 seconds, and they happen every few moments.
Not sure if it matters any, but today is probably the worst I have seen of the lag in the last 2 weeks.
Sunday, 26 SEP, 1:50 PM EST.
Huge lag spike, half the players ended up disconnecting from the server.
just had a NASTY lag spike that disconnected me and then showed the server as offline. When I tried to load EFUSL this was the error I got.
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 110 in /home/efudms/escapefromunderdark.com/efusl/poc.php on line 25
Error connecting
Server seems to be back up now though
Crazy lag, 11pm, PST
No error messages.
Seconded.
Thank you for the continued reports. This has been an absolute mess to try to track down.
In other news, the server will start showing back up in gamespy after the next reset.
Aside from the one that happened yesterday, (which looks to be an in-game thing, not network lag), has it been happening less?
Lag from the server seems to be totally gone lately.
Horribad lag, 5:08 PST while doing Vradz
1.08am GMT Lag confirmed. Major lag during Imps quest for the duration of the quest. right up till reset.
Quite a bit of lag last night 10/21 around midnight EST. At just about the same time could not access forums/website either.
Another considerable spike in lag, 12:30pm EST on Saturday 10/23. Trouble loading website/forums at the same time as well again.
Today, 10pm - current GMT -7, or as of this post. Pretty terrible lag, delayed convos, ect. Been bad for a week or so again and is quite frustrating :S
Today at 13:50 (GMT+1), quite alot of lag, delayed conversation and timing out when attempting to log on.
Also want to note that I've seen consistent issues on the forums as well this week. Pages sometimes won't load on the first try. Have to stop the first attempt and reload.
Lag was consistent and very heavy from 6pm GMT+0 Sunday 7th November until 11:30pm.
Lag jumps and spikes happening every 1-2 minutes. Expreienced by at least 4 players excluding myself who i spoke to.
Happened when alone and in groups up to 4 people. In large and small areas, with many and no NPC's/placeibles.
Turned off all extra effects and was still lagging along with group of players I was with.
Most of us are Euro (UK) based.
Had a lot of lag tonight, played fine from from 7-9pm GMT or so, then the server had a huge lag spike (it seemed) and lagged terribly ever since.