I'm getting closer to an answer on this 30,000ms delay thing. I don't think it has anything to do with MQ, but more testing is required.
Right now, I've had 18 characters logged in and all of their delays are 30-50ms. They have all been logged in for over 2 hours, which is way longer than it was taking for this 30 second response time bug to kick in yesterday. Individually, they can all change zones in 3-5 seconds (assuming the zone was already up). I zoned 18 characters all at the same time and it took 27 seconds for it to complete.
Shortly after the mass /gate, all the toons had response times from anywhere between 400ms and 1200ms. This seems to be correcting itself slowly over time while I have them sitting in place not doing anything. Many of the 500ms response times lowered down to 300ms after a minute or two. My main cleric's 1200ms response time was down to 850 and lowering. I think this will work itself out as I wait.
My current theory is that the huge lags don't really kick in until I bring the bards online and make them start twisting their songs. I have 3 total bards and when they are simultaneously twisting, it generates quite a lot of chatter in the chat windows of 20+ toons all at once. I am wondering if more is going on in the background with bard songs that might be contributing to this giant delay. Going to wait for the response times on all my toons to get back down to 100 or less, then bring them online and make them /twist. I will monitor response times both before and after issuing /twist 1 2 3 (makes them twist spells in the first 3 gem slots).
Sorry for bringing up anything MQ related in the post. I'm not seeking MQ support here at all. If I determine that to be a contributor to the problem, I will take this discussion elsewhere. I am including the information for the sake of drawing a more complete picture.
Edit: I brought the bards online. They all three had 30ms response times while in gfay. I #summoned them to PoK with the rest of the toons and they had 40-50ms response times. I left them idle there for several minutes. My response times on all toons are still gradually lowering during the several minutes. Response times on all toons were between 125ms and 135ms. They didn't seem to be lowering further than that, though perhaps it might have happened if I waited longer. I decided to make all three bards twist the songs in their first 3 gem slots. Most of the chatter is in the GM's chat box. It displays the full name of every song as soon as it is successfully cast. The other toons just have a bunch of "The elemental chorus fades" entries in their chat. If this is what triggers the problem I'm investigating, I imagine it could take 15-20 minutes or so for it to kick in. Will edit the post again if it recurs.
In the meantime, this is what my performance currently looks like. Left is the host machine where the eq clients are running. Right side is the guest machine, where the server lives.
