goodbye, cruel world...

[Ari]

More than likely there's some wonky coding involved in Naxx from legacy WoW that's screwing things up.

[blahism]

People are complaining about the several second latency and instances hanging for seconds/minutes at a time. Not FPS issues. Sure, some clueless individuals who don't know any better are complaining about FPS. But that's not a concern.

If you have no idea what the community is talking about, go to Premonition - Sen'jin (US), click the video link in the 2nd news post, about us server transferring. Watch the video. That's the problem.

again, it depends on how you define it. I get latency that causes fps issues because my pc is waiting to draw stuff.. its the very same latency that causes dalaran to be slow - test it for yourself. Login at 5 a.m. - 40-50fps in dalaran - login at 5pm .. 20-22 fps.

the latency inmpacts fps drastically depending on the scenario.

once again, its too bad the "latency" in wow client is only a ping and not an actual round trip transaction that tests your performance as it truely is. The servers or client could be 100% cpu load and ping would never let you know.

Also a shame blizz tells people to upgrade hardware, defrag disk, patch windows, run dxdiag so on and so forth when any person with IT knowledge can experiment and find out where the points of failure and choke points are.

A lot of it is on the server, but i have a feeling they're going to have to re-work the client majorly before any server optimizations can make a difference. Just hitting the upper limit of there architecture.. otherwise they could simply throw more hardware at the problem if it was a resource issue.

but we shall never know.

[blahism]

Honestly, i think each server has their unique problems. The "rubber band effect" messes with me big time - very distracting but other people don't notice that. Some people call that latency but i know thats just a bug because i've reported it and had it confirmed - there ping times are perfectly fine, its just the way the client/server are trying to guesstimate their position relative to me.

I get latency/lag where my fps doesn't drop as well. people just dissapear and i'm instagibbed or people are dying around me while i run around and i can't click anything or any abilities and then it resumes right back up and everything is crazy. This hasn't happened to me much since they fixed wintergrasp last week but i haven't done much 25 man since.

[Xav]

again, it depends on how you define it. I get latency that causes fps issues because my pc is waiting to draw stuff.. its the very same latency that causes dalaran to be slow - test it for yourself. Login at 5 a.m. - 40-50fps in dalaran - login at 5pm .. 20-22 fps.

the latency inmpacts fps drastically depending on the scenario.

once again, its too bad the "latency" in wow client is only a ping and not an actual round trip transaction that tests your performance as it truely is. The servers or client could be 100% cpu load and ping would never let you know.

Also a shame blizz tells people to upgrade hardware, defrag disk, patch windows, run dxdiag so on and so forth when any person with IT knowledge can experiment and find out where the points of failure and choke points are.

A lot of it is on the server, but i have a feeling they're going to have to re-work the client majorly before any server optimizations can make a difference. Just hitting the upper limit of there architecture.. otherwise they could simply throw more hardware at the problem if it was a resource issue.

but we shall never know.

That "latency" is a million fucking people being in the area at peak hour. Thus, your computer takes a crap trying to render everything at once. Not only do many people in small areas require more computer power to run smoothly, but it chokes up the servers as well.

If you could put shitty performance in a vacuum (like, say, being in Icecrown where there's not a ton of players, but is near Dalaran and on the Northrend server), you'd see you'd still most likely have awful lag when the server is under a lot of pressure.

Poor server performance/unresponsive servers do not actually cause the client's (you and I) computer to run poorly.

[kolben]

I'm putting my money on it being either a change in their trunk provider, or a change the provider made to their topology.

[deadwrong]

in response to a few previous posts...

the players in my guild are not leaving due to some addiction where they need to be playing wow 24x7, it is down to a radical change in the way the endgame pans out at level 80.

we have gone from (at 70) raiding 4 nights a week with really challenging content (and lots of it - 2 multi-boss instances per raiding tier usually), wipe nights, and a real sense of achievement for first-kills, to (at 80) 2 nights a week of (pretty much) facerolling content.

i am trying to think of a good analogy here and all i can come up with is comparing it to someone who races Formula1 (or Nascar for you yanks) coming into work one day and being given a go-kart, with only blind pensioners on the track to compete againt.

regarding the actual performance issues we are seeing, i could spend hours detailing what my thoughts are here and (being an operations manager for a hosted services provider with accountability for a few thousand servers and the services they deliver to our clients) i could probably have a good stab at what they may be. but, without knowing blizards actual architecture, it would just be educated guess-work.

any problems on a hosted platform can be fixed though and, usually, without too much difficulty. i am slightly bemused by some of Kolben's claims as issues such as "wonky" frame sizes and spanning-tree are extremely easy to identify and remedy, given the right resources (including skilled engineers). i also doubt they would be using Foundry SI's given their reputation in the market. F5 LTM's or Cisco CSM's are more industry standard these days.

the issues are, quite obviously, load related. it is just a case of where that load is causing a break-point in the architecture and resolving. it won't be a change in trunk provider (unless one they made between TBC and WotLK) and even it it was it should be a simple case of re-optimising the routing with the carrier. if the issue is at the edge of their netowrk, which i doubt, it is more likely to be related to their peering points.

aaaaarrrrgh, i said i wouldn't get started on that and i did.... back to work.

- DW

[Synapse]

in response to a few previous posts...

the players in my guild are not leaving due to some addiction where they need to be playing wow 24x7, it is down to a radical change in the way the endgame pans out at level 80.

we have gone from (at 70) raiding 4 nights a week with really challenging content (and lots of it - 2 multi-boss instances per raiding tier usually), wipe nights, and a real sense of achievement for first-kills, to (at 80) 2 nights a week of (pretty much) facerolling content.

Tough luck chum, early raids are easy. If you want to make it tough, why not go for the achievements? heroic raids with 20 people. Normal raids with 8, Sarth 3D...

[melech]

Tough luck chum, early raids are easy. If you want to make it tough, why not go for the achievements? heroic raids with 20 people. Normal raids with 8, Sarth 3D...

If you had bothered reading some of the earlier posts you would have seen that this is what we are actually trying to do, yes I'm in the same guild as Deadwrong. But it's really frustrating when you fail due to bad server performance. Doing immortal/undying runs boils down to pure luck.

On a side note, I personally don't like achievements at raid level where you have to exclude a number of people from raids to complete them.

[Synapse]

If you bothered to read some of the earlier posts, you would have seen that I realized you are having latency issues (see what I did there? There's no point being cynical).

So yeah. You want tough content, but the server makes it too tough for you. Make a choice.

[IKT]

regarding the actual performance issues we are seeing

the issues are, quite obviously, load related. it is just a case of where that load is causing a break-point in the architecture and resolving.

would have thought 6+ years of load testing would have been enough time to figure this stuff out?

Unless naxx/maly/os are putting some kind of new load pressure on the hardware.

[Delicatesse]

Whatever happened, it happened in 3.0.2. That was the patch before LK, when DKs were not yet present and BC raidinstances got nerfed.

Before that I can't remember having sub-10 FPS ANYWHERE except in Shatt at peak times. Raids were always running at 15-30 fps, which is not much but my hardware is/was not that great. 15 FPS is playable anyways so I didn't complain.
Lags we see nowadays never ever happened before that patch.

Then 3.0.2 ruined it all.
5-6 FPS on Black Temple aoe trashpulls. The same happened to almost everyone in the guild. Abysmal FPS since 3.0.2. GREAT. Extremely brutal lag at RoS P2 and P3 - for everyone trying to kill that boss at peak time. If there weren't the extreme tank TPS buff (and the general raid damage/HP nerf), it would have been totally 10000% unkillable all the time.

I doubled my ram from 1 to 2 GB and bought a gef9600 instead of the 6600 I had. Not much have changed FPS wise and NOTHING has changed with the lag. Loading times are much shorter, but that's all.

I would be very amazed if these problems were not software related.

[Synapse]

Whatever happened, it happened in 3.0.2. That was the patch before LK, when DKs were not yet present and BC raidinstances got nerfed.

Before that I can't remember having sub-10 FPS ANYWHERE except in Shatt at peak times. Raids were always running at 15-30 fps, which is not much but my hardware is/was not that great. 15 FPS is playable anyways so I didn't complain.
Lags we see nowadays never ever happened before that patch.

Then 3.0.2 ruined it all.
5-6 FPS on Black Temple aoe trashpulls. The same happened to almost everyone in the guild. Abysmal FPS since 3.0.2. GREAT. Extremely brutal lag at RoS P2 and P3 - for everyone trying to kill that boss at peak time. If there weren't the extreme tank TPS buff (and the general raid damage/HP nerf), it would have been totally 10000% unkillable all the time.

I doubled my ram from 1 to 2 GB and bought a gef9600 instead of the 6600 I had. Not much have changed FPS wise and NOTHING has changed with the lag. Loading times are much shorter, but that's all.

I would be very amazed if these problems were not software related.

On the fps...mess with your shadows. The shadows engine alone is what made my fps drop from easymode 60 to...3 on empty places.


I also haven't noticed any latency differences, but then again due to distances i'm defaulted at 300ms(which is much, much better than what anyone used to less than that talks about - I see people complaining about 100ms and wonder how the hell they can't play with a 0,1s delay)

[deadwrong]

If you bothered to read some of the earlier posts, you would have seen that I realized you are having latency issues (see what I did there? There's no point being cynical).

So yeah. You want tough content, but the server makes it too tough for you. Make a choice.

and the choices are?

i didn't start this thread for you to get 1-ups on people for reading posts or not so can we keep things constructive please?

- DW

[Delicatesse]

On the fps...mess with your shadows. The shadows engine alone is what made my fps drop from easymode 60 to...3 on empty places.

/sigh
Why do you think that I didn't try EVERYTHING to increase my FPS?
I run at 30-50 FPS with shadows on and everything else more or less maxed - when playing alone in Northrend, or 5mans.
In raids I can turn off EVERYTHING to zero and discard all addons and still get sub 10 FPS sometimes.

Yeah the WoW graphic engine is surely very good.

[Synapse]

/sigh
Why do you think that I didn't try EVERYTHING to increase my FPS?
I run at 30-50 FPS with shadows on and everything else more or less maxed - when playing alone in Northrend, or 5mans.
In raids I can turn off EVERYTHING to zero and discard all addons and still get sub 10 FPS sometimes.

Yeah the WoW graphic engine is surely very good.

I don't know you, so while it's obvious for you that you tried everything, for others it isn't. You said you had an issue, and I gave you a suggestion. Sorry it wasn't of any help.

[Delicatesse]

I don't know you, so while it's obvious for you that you tried everything, for others it isn't. You said you had an issue, and I gave you a suggestion. Sorry it wasn't of any help.

Sorry I didn't mean to be rude. I'm just fed up with lag and fps problems and react badly to standard responses

[Synapse]

here, have a cookie. I'm out of tasty cupcakes =(

[Delicatesse]

I'm out of tasty cupcakes =(

I'm 1 recipe away from the Chef title. Maybe I can cook one

[swelt]

In all my years in IT, the first question I've learned to ask when there are problems is "what's changed?" All this talk of networks and datacentres is fascinating speculation, but aren't you missing a rather significant change? They implemented a new major revision of the software. V3.x of WoW.

Raid wide buff mechanics and some of the specific talent implementations are my personal favourite guess for what is causing performance issues. Let's take an example - ferocious inspiration, the BM hunter talent. Have you ever noticed it spamming your scrolling combat text as you gain and lose FI in a group? Annoyed me enough to filter it in MSBT. Have you thought about what it means to client/server traffic for every one of the 25 clients in the raid to have that sent across the wire every fraction of a second? That's CPU load on the server, it's network load, IO, whatever. One example, but I would expect that there are going to be plenty of new talents, new mechanics, or old mechanics that haven't scaled well that have pushed up load.

So something is bottlenecking, maybe it's something on the servers, the lan or wan, whatever. But most likely the cause is in software. The solution might be to upgrade the server/network capacity to meet the new requirements of the software, but it's as likely to involve software optimisation as well.

I'm pretty confident that Blizzard will fix it, they have a reasonable track record and should certainly have the financial resources + motivation. I doubt it's a quick fix though.

[deadwrong]

swelt - i totally agree, hence i referenced 'load on architecture' rather than specifically pointing fingers at the network. i have the questionable responsibility for everything in the datacentre from the tin upwards and, IMHO, the issues we are currently seeing are server-load and not network.

if that is down to badly written code - i doubt we will ever know but, given the massive changes to the gameplay mechanics running on the same engine as when WoW was released, it is a likely candidate.

Blizzard could actually fix this in the same way some of my more ill-educated clients do by simply throwing more hardware at the platform. but, at the end of the day, this will just hide the problem for a period of time until the load starts to build again.

- DW