Windows Server Installer :: Modular & Scripted

[kuahara]

Well... I'm back to where I started. I have no idea what was causing that problem. The bards have been afk twisting, took the wife out for about an hour, came back, and everyone's response time is at 90-135ms.

Was hoping to have something useful to reply back with. Sorry for all the fruitless chatter.

[Akkadius]

It sounds like you are experiencing packet loss. These symptoms occur when the server starts having to re-transmit packets to many clients at once and the ping/latency response from the client perspective rises.

If you're doing this on the same machine through VM etc. you may want to investigate potential bottlenecks or other things going on. Again we have folks who zone 50+ toons on our higher player-base servers and there are 0 issues unless their connection is experiencing packet loss, these sorts of symptoms occur where eventually they completely desync or things get sluggish.

18 clients - my suggestion as well is to use all the filters you can on your boxes, not MQ2 filter, but the client filters. These client filters are pushed up to the server and the server will not send you the packets for those messages, that can heavily reduce spam/resends in combat scenarios etc. If you were doing lots of combat and then you tried to zone not long after something like this that would cause your problem. Another client side thing that you should make sure you're doing as well is making sure that /log is disabled - this is a huge performance hit to the client and I wouldn't ever have it enabled unless you really need to log something

HTH

Akk

[kuahara]

I'll check to see if logs are on here in a bit and disable if needed.

I did finally do something that seems to have triggered it. I created 2 new toons while 21 other toons were online and in PoK. Both DE races. They each loaded into neriak with 30ms response times to the server, but all the toons in PoK had their response times shoot from 135ish to 5000-8000.

When I created one of the toons, I hit exit > logout and quit/closed the 2nd client so I could create only one at a time. I noticed that if I ever log a character out all the way to server select, then back to char select -> unti world, that instance of EQ will have severe artifacting issues (super stretched images that don't even closely resemble what the image is supposed to be). The artifacting is resolved by closing that one client completely and restarting it.

Am going to finish creating my toons. I expect to have around 30 when completely done and then see if giving everything a fresh start resolves the issue.

What response times are your 50+ toons that are all running on the same machine looking at?

I'd be real surprised if I was experiencing loss between 2 machines in the same network. Especially if it's not touching that outside interface anymore. I will do a continuous ping from client to server and check, though. Not sure if the results are relevant to the EQ client/server relationship or not. I assume it'd be indicative.

[Akkadius]

Originally Posted by kuahara

I'll check to see if logs are on here in a bit and disable if needed.

I did finally do something that seems to have triggered it. I created 2 new toons while 21 other toons were online and in PoK. Both DE races. They each loaded into neriak with 30ms response times to the server, but all the toons in PoK had their response times shoot from 135ish to 5000-8000.

When I created one of the toons, I hit exit > logout and quit/closed the 2nd client so I could create only one at a time. I noticed that if I ever log a character out all the way to server select, then back to char select -> unti world, that instance of EQ will have severe artifacting issues (super stretched images that don't even closely resemble what the image is supposed to be). The artifacting is resolved by closing that one client completely and restarting it.

Am going to finish creating my toons. I expect to have around 30 when completely done and then see if giving everything a fresh start resolves the issue.

What response times are your 50+ toons that are all running on the same machine looking at?

I'd be real surprised if I was experiencing loss between 2 machines in the same network. Especially if it's not touching that outside interface anymore. I will do a continuous ping from client to server and check, though. Not sure if the results are relevant to the EQ client/server relationship or not. I assume it'd be indicative.

One thing I want you to do is make sure you have the most up to date binaries. The installer doesn't keep the latest bleeding edge server binaries, only approved stable releases

Open up cmd

perl eqemu_server.pl windows_server_latest

Baseline that for troubleshooting and go from there

[kuahara]

Just completed that. I also forgot to mention that the artifacting thing I described, when logging out a character and logging in a different character on the same account.... or logging one out to server select, then back in again without closing the client. That issue happens even when I play on other people's servers. I'm not terribly worried about that one particular issue because it's easily fixed by just closing that one client and reloading it.

Screenshotted the output of the command you had me run.




Will post back with any changes. Going to go ahead and load up the other 20 toons for the heck of it right now, then create more and see if it causes their response times to shoot up.