Odd stability

[dusta]

Ok so i have done lots of testing with this and servers stability. My problem only comes into play if im boxing the load of characters. Meaning about 15 or so. So say i go into Vex Thal with my team of 15 fight my way to luclin. I get to luclin engage her everything goes fine and normal mind you minus the fact it takes me a good 4 mins to kill her with my army. I run 12 pets 7 of which are donors with donor zerk donor rog donor paladin. Here is the odd kicker. I can go into zone with say Nilibus we went and did luclin other day with me only play the rog and nilibus playing his 18 - 20 characters (more then me) and im capable of dropping luclin in about 8 seconds flat. While my client can keep up with the rogs dps and the server side of things can keep up with rog dps it cannot keep up with rog zerk war bst all the pets and spell casting. I have all logs turned off etc it is def server side as im set to the lowest possible settings there are to put in place. I feel as if the server or the client is unable to keep up with the amount dps pumping at the time as im doing well over 20m a tick fully unloading on a mob which is understandable as we can pump out the dps using only 1-10 chars that a entire raid does to single mob on normal servers.

So question is, is there anything us players can do to maybe reduce the lag? It seems the more pets you have on a mob the worse it gets for players. Ive even stopped summoning my draekon pets on clerics etc because the mass lag their cause once sent on mobs. Almost seems as if somewhere in the pet data there is a memory leak somewhere.

[Denizen]

I believe Vaion indicated Luclin scales up with the number of characters attacking her. That being said I'm sure you've perused forums here and elsewhere on optimizing boxing settings. Biggies for me, that are sometimes missed are:

1. If you have more than one program affecting FPS only bottle neck one of them. If, for example, you use MQ2, and I know you do , then throttle down dps only on MQ2FPS but make sure your settings in Everquest are set to maximum possible fps. If say, you set both of them at exactly 20 fps, then tiny differences twixt the two in time of calculation etc can lead to serious loads placed on CPU/GPU.

2. Use stick figures or Dark Diplomat illusion
3. Use MQ2FPS to set background FPS to zero so screens not being looked at aren't rendered
4. Don't use Luclin graphics

lots of other things, such as the server filters you mentioned, as you know, but hey, you might have missed the obvious, I have more than once.

Go to http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest and test your connections a few times and look at Buffer Bloat score. Then do the same thing with your max number of characters up on EQ and look at buffer bloat. If you have an F in Buffer Bloat either way, then tweaking your router would appear to be something to look at.

Something that would be nice to have "cooking on the back burner" of the server would be the ability to cast Dark Diplomat on ones' pet. Might help GPU load.

[dusta]

Oh ill be honest i have more then enough hardware myself to never lag as well as 220 mbs it is def a pet thing i think. Without my draekons it seems okish but once i send quite few those in is when the lag starts to set in and i see huge spikes. I could be wrong. But i do have everything set to absolute lowest settings possible ass auras turned off particles spells everything is cut off to maximize boxing limits. But it does seem a lot more noticeable when there are quite a bit pets involved. This test was with my 12 chars at the time verse Nilibus 20 chars or 18 cant remember. I can even kill her that fast with my guys if i dont send a lot pets. Something is bogging down the npc.

[Denizen]

But the thing is, you do lag. And lag could reside in some combination of at least the following:
1. Your machine
2. If considered separately your NIC
3. Your internet connection
4. Your router
5. The THF server both machine side and software side

It is very difficult for me, at any rate, to try and see if the THF server might be the problem. Only way I could do this is by eliminating things I can measure.

Buffer Bloat is a problem. It is easy to test, will take you 2 minutes. Do it and measure it.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

My connections and computers have, in the past, been so stretched, that it pushed me over the limit and froze all my characters if one other character would zone into, for example, the Lord Draekon event. Yes yes you have a hugely better connection but that connection has to interface correctly with your computer and your computer and NIC can be tweaked possibly.

[Ydiss]

It's likely a number of factors but there's definitely a difference dependent on the zone. Our 2 group raid doesn't lag at all in any zone (as should be expected, we both have fast connections and 12 characters is a low number) but we recently fired up our old guild into a 14 toon raid and visited HoH. The lag, whilst not constant, is obvious there. It very much feels like it's due to the zone wide server-side calculation that goes on. The server is doing all sorts of stuff with godly points and evolving items with every kill and it has to handle those transactions and transmit them to multiple clients.

That's only with 14 clients. I remember how bad it would get with a full raid or when another raid was in zone (even idle); it rendered the zone unusable and it might as well have been instanced. It wasn't because our connection was bad or our mq2 setup wasn't optimised (it was very optimised).

It may be better now and I've not been to Vex Thal so can't comment on that (but I do believe it has similar zone wide stuff going on) but my experiences suggests to me that the complexity of the zone is likely to impact performance (Zek is a good example of this too).

Whether having more pets exacerbates the symptoms or not, I'm not certain (the 14 toon raid has 3-4 pets, so not a massive amount), but I don't think it can be dismissed as a possibility, unless it's been empirically tested and found not to be true, of course.

[dusta]

I agree its very hard to pin point the actual cause as everything is custom and newish to the client. From what i can tell though ive pin pointed it to draekons and or donor pets. If i only attack with my melee it seems ok no lag the mobs hp wont spike it goes down accordingly. Once i send in the 12 pets is when i see mobs go from 90 to 50 to 70 to 40 to 60 to 30 etc till it finally dies either showing a lot health upon death or correct health. Why im trying to see if its the pets and or custom weps they use. But imo something with one of the pets is almost causing a memory leak. Which could be the cause of the amount players in a zone issue having a lot memory leaking pets at once will crash a zone or darn sure try. hehe

[Otter620]

What will fix this problem is RoF client

[dusta]

What will fix this problem is RoF client

RoF2 is in the works. Which is another reason ive been suggesting it as it can handle the dps we will throw at it compared to underfoot. Why i was wondering if its a client side thing not being able keep up or the possible memory leak from pets as it can keep up with casting / melee dps just fine on my end till i sent all pets in.

[Denizen]

Thing is it could be the Lord Draekon pets per se or it could be that in handling the pets, it just pushes something in my above list over a limit so that your fight totally lags out. So do the stuff that you can, as above, to see if it gets better. With the Buffer bloat measure that comes free and ez with http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest you have a tool to measure how much more buffer bloat, or lag, you have with and without Draekon pets: run your characters with and without Draekon pets and measure buffer bloat each way. In terms of your effort it is sooo much easier than just parsing a 2 minute fight in guild hall with a parser dummy.

As you know I eventually tweaked out my previous connection so that I could, in most zones, box 24 characters on a 12 mbps connection.... and actually when looking at my consumed bandwidth, I usually was using less than 5 mbps. All my characters with non-donor pets have Draekon pets and have them up.

[dusta]

But the thing is, you do lag. And lag could reside in some combination of at least the following:
1. Your machine
2. If considered separately your NIC
3. Your internet connection
4. Your router
5. The THF server both machine side and software side

It is very difficult for me, at any rate, to try and see if the THF server might be the problem. Only way I could do this is by eliminating things I can measure.

Buffer Bloat is a problem. It is easy to test, will take you 2 minutes. Do it and measure it.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

My connections and computers have, in the past, been so stretched, that it pushed me over the limit and froze all my characters if one other character would zone into, for example, the Lord Draekon event. Yes yes you have a hugely better connection but that connection has to interface correctly with your computer and your computer and NIC can be tweaked possibly.

I get what you are saying 100%. Thing is though this isnt every single zone or mob at times. I run with guismo a lot we together have about 48 characters we play all at once in a single zone. We have yet to crash a zone but toons across our computers here and there yes. DSK 3 for most part is one the most stable zones on this server as for no lag etc hoh is horrible also but the instances are non lag on my end. The zones them self never lag for me but certain mobs once attacked. Even when the mob is spiking its not me lagging its the server trying keep up with all the dps being thrown at it. We our out dpsing what the server is capable of handling which is the stability problems for some zones once engaging a mob. I just wanna ensure its actually not a specific pet and or pet weapon that may be causing it as it could be a much easier fix temp till rof2 is released.