I've had 13 existing toons parked in PoK since my last post over an hour ago. I created 11 new toons since then and have used the GM to summon some of them around. So far all their response times with the server are 30-45ms. 25 toons online and so far no sudden jumps to 5k, 10k, 20k or 30k ms.
Only new thing right now is that I can log in literally every toon except the reserve clerics. Trying to log just those toons in is causing them to autocrash for some reason, but it's probably just a bit of bad luck at this point.
If the issue recurs, I'll post back. Though I'm not sure what else can be done at this point.
I ran that continuous ping for a while, both before all the toons were online and after. Nearly all replies came in 11ms or less. One stray packet was responded to in 383ms. I'd expect that with the server running in a VM, the replies come in 1ms or less. I administer a small Windows domain at work that has about 60 machines in it spread across two buildings. As I write this message, I VPN'd into my work network, RDP'd into my work PC, then pinged a machine in the building across the street. The response times were 4ms, 3ms, 5ms, 3ms. When I ping the gateway (same building, but opposite side of the building), all replies are <1ms.
Here on my home PC, the server and clients are literally the same machine, one is just in a VM. Not sure why I can't get <1ms replies when I ping.
Pings to the gateway, which is physically separate, come back in <1ms.
If I fire up wireshark, is there some EQ specific traffic I can look at and see if that <localaddress> tag in eqeqmu_config.xml is doing what it's supposed to do or if the traffic is still being routed through the outside interface?
Edit: Every time I think I know something....
So I started having the issue with high response times again, but now I'm guessing it has something to do with what I'm doing for new toons. I have a hotkey setup on the GM to level it to 60, increase all the skills to max, hand it some plat, turn on GM speed (temporarily), give it a bunch of AA, etc... I'd moved the new 11 toons to PoK and hadn't had an issue. Unless I just needed to wait a minute for it to kick in after moving so many so quickly. As soon as I started smacking the hotkey to scribe all spells for each of the new toons, I started having this problem, so I popped open a cmd terminal and....
Also, I'm not convinced that it's the server. I left 1 toon in Neriak and his response time in game shows 31ms. I summoned him to PoK with the GM and upon zone in, he's showing 25.4k ms. Took him quite a while to zone in too.