Windows Server Installer :: Modular & Scripted

[Akkadius]

Unknown DB string is going to show up depending on the types of data you're dealing with on older clients.

if you want to minimize string related issues on the client side I would suggest using ROF2

You can grab a clean version of ROF2 and use its spells_us and dbstr files to import to the server before you try exporting. The database tables are not guaranteed to be up to date.

And yes - this is not really the place for MQ2 support - there is mqemulator.net for that.

Memory footprint from the emulator is not going to be that large

[kuahara]

ok, but what about the <localaddress> bit from the last question? Is that in the right place? Would that have anything to do with the long delay? 30s delay makes this unplayable.


Thanks.

[Akkadius]

Originally Posted by kuahara

ok, but what about the <localaddress> bit from the last question? Is that in the right place? Would that have anything to do with the long delay? 30s delay makes this unplayable.


Thanks.

localaddress just needs to be under the <world> section

As far as your delay - you're going to have to narrow down that issue, it could be anything. We have servers in production with folks with 50+ box crews who zone in seconds. I'd suggest looking at your PC's resources when the slowdown occurs.

[kuahara]

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.

[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.