Slow loading, is it just me?

[Ynaught]

I've been having slow zoning and loading issues on my main account for quite a long time. Around a year at this point. I play nearly exclusively on Excelsior, but this was happening long before we got the population surge from the recent "the game is now official" announcement. It also affects whenever I access the Select Character screen.

 

I have 3 accounts total and while the other 2 also seem slow, when I compare them to friends who stream while we're playing together, they are nowhere near as slow as the main. It can easily take me 30-45 seconds to zone into or out of a mission or from zone to zone at times on my main account. The other 2 accounts load in maybe 15-20 seconds. All times are subjective but noticeable when comparing my screen to the stream of my friends. Perception bias and all that. Which makes playing with friends a bit of a pain. I'm late getting to the zone where the mission is, late getting into the mission, late exiting mission, late zoning to where the next mission is... you get the idea.

 

It's not a constant thing as there are times, rare as they are, where I will zone in 10 seconds or less. These shorter zone times will happen maybe one day out of a month, give or take.

 

I'm wondering if the amount of alts I have on the main account could be an issue? I have nearly 360 alts on my main account. Yes, having that many alts likely will be causing slow loading when trying to access the character select screen, that I understand and it makes perfect sense. But talking with a friend who has much more knowledge of server systems than I do, he says that the number of alts on the account likely shouldn't affect zoning as the character DB is separate from the instance DB. Once the alt is in a zone, it is 'more or less' only handled by the instanced servers. At least, I think I'm saying this correctly.

 

Anyway, my system should be well and above what is needed to run the game. All drivers have been updated as needed. No over heating or overclocking going on. Download/upload speeds are within acceptable range of what I should be getting from my ISP, actually a tad over but, I'm not going to complain about that.

mpg z490 gaming edge wifi (ms-7c79)

intel core i7 10700

RTX 3080

32 GB RAM

100Mbps/10Mbps DSL internet

 

I'm willing to accept this is probably just a "me" issue, but if anyone has any potential ideas as to what might be causing my problem or any potential solutions, any and all help would be much appreciated.

[shortguy on indom]

On 3/4/2024 at 2:13 PM, Ynaught said:

100Mbps/10Mbps DSL internet

Perhaps this is the issue.  Are you wifi connected or ethernet cable connected? 

Some other ideas:   https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/tips-to-improve-pc-performance-in-windows-b3b3ef5b-5953-fb6a-2528-4bbed82fba96

 

I have laptop with 1/2 of your system specs but a faster 400Mbps/12 up connection and getting about the same map load-times.  So mine is hardware issue.  Thinking maybe because you have much better hardware but slower connection it may be your issue.

 

Sounds silly but a hard reset of modem/router may help?

 

Hope it helps.

[Ynaught]

11 hours ago, shortguy on indom said:

Are you wifi connected or ethernet cable connected?

 

...

 

Sounds silly but a hard reset of modem/router may help?

Ethernet cable connected. I much prefer being wired over using wifi. I've also reset my modem multiple times. Unplugged it, waited a minute or two and powered it back up. No noticeable change.

 

I'll look over the website and see if anything there will help. Thanks for the feedback.

[GM Tock]

If there is lag coming from your network stack, it'll be visible by using

 

/netgraph 1 

 (/netgraph 0 to disable.)

 

If the chart is green and not block-filled, something else might be an issue.  This might help:

Other advice: if you have a Game Accelerator app that's supposed to improve network performance (common in new systems and motherboard drivers these days), see if you can shut that off for Homecoming: City of Heroes specifically (or if it has an "on/off" switch you can toggle in the Toolbar, make sure it's off before you launch).

[Ynaught]

On 3/10/2024 at 10:01 AM, GM Tock said:

If there is lag coming from your network stack, it'll be visible by using

 

/netgraph 1 

 (/netgraph 0 to disable.)

 

If the chart is green and not block-filled, something else might be an issue.  This might help:

Other advice: if you have a Game Accelerator app that's supposed to improve network performance (common in new systems and motherboard drivers these days), see if you can shut that off for Homecoming: City of Heroes specifically (or if it has an "on/off" switch you can toggle in the Toolbar, make sure it's off before you launch).

 

My netgraph looks like a freshly mowed lawn, so that doesn't appear to be the issue.

 

I'll have to give the troubleshoot stuff a bit of time to look over so I'll skip commenting on that for right now.

 

As for a Game Accelerator app, I don't believe I have one running. I'll have to dive into things to make certain I don't, but off the top of my head, that certainly doesn't sound familiar.

 

I appreciate you taking the time to respond to this issue. I'll post any new findings as I find them. Hopefully this is just something on my end that I can eventually track down and fix.

[Ynaught]

On 3/10/2024 at 10:01 AM, GM Tock said:

This might help:

 

 

I spent some time looking over the troubleshooting post and everything there seems to be within expectation. I tweaked some settings and while my framerate isn't consistently over 60fps, it's usually above 30, so I'm happy enough there. (certain zones are an issue, especially when events are running)

But, no matter what settings I tweak, actual zone loading is still an issue. It's probably just the route that I have to take connecting to the game servers. Thanks again for the help.

[GM Tock]

Two biggest factors for Zone Loading would be Network and Hard Drive above all else.  Network speed seems alright (100/10Mbps on DSL actually sounds good, most folks on DSL have a hard time escaping 6MBps), but what's the Latency measurement?  (Folks say Speedtest, but it's got a few problems.  I tend to use fast.com more for a simple test.)

 

Apart from that, your system seems modern-ish enough to use a M.2 NVMe drive.  Or the game's running on a different device perhaps?  The hard drive write speed is also a huge help on loading screens between zones.

[shortguy on indom]

One or two more oddball things to check...

If you are running W-11.  This seems somewhat common issue on other online games, some fixes for other games were Virtual Memory related.

You have quite a bit of memory, maybe cleaning the cache will help a lil.

Not sure what below will do for you, but link is from M$ site:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-to-optimize-gaming-performance-in-windows-11-a255f612-2949-4373-a566-ff6f3f474613

 

(For my linux sys... swappiness adjustment helped a bit.  Specifically from 60 to 15... for 16G of Ram, seems to be sweet spot).

[Ynaught]

20 hours ago, GM Tock said:

Two biggest factors for Zone Loading would be Network and Hard Drive above all else.  Network speed seems alright (100/10Mbps on DSL actually sounds good, most folks on DSL have a hard time escaping 6MBps), but what's the Latency measurement?  (Folks say Speedtest, but it's got a few problems.  I tend to use fast.com more for a simple test.)

 

Apart from that, your system seems modern-ish enough to use a M.2 NVMe drive.  Or the game's running on a different device perhaps?  The hard drive write speed is also a huge help on loading screens between zones.

Used fast.com and it shows Latency as, unloaded = 23ms and loaded = 26ms. On top of that, it's showing my download speed at 100Mbps but upload is at 13Mbps. Interesting.

 

I do indeed have 2 M.2 NVMe drives, one for the OS and other stuff and the other for games, which is where CoH is. So that shouldn't be an issue. I'd hope anyway.

 

5 hours ago, shortguy on indom said:

One or two more oddball things to check...

If you are running W-11.  This seems somewhat common issue on other online games, some fixes for other games were Virtual Memory related.

You have quite a bit of memory, maybe cleaning the cache will help a lil.

Not sure what below will do for you, but link is from M$ site:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-to-optimize-gaming-performance-in-windows-11-a255f612-2949-4373-a566-ff6f3f474613

 

(For my linux sys... swappiness adjustment helped a bit.  Specifically from 60 to 15... for 16G of Ram, seems to be sweet spot).

I am on Win11, so I will give the link a look over and hope something there will help.

Thanks again for all the help, it is really appreciated.

[Spectre7878]

I took a short break from COH. And I am having the same issues. When I try to zone or enter missions I get long load times. I also got no mapserver connnection. Try again. I am on windows 11. I am so frustrated. Can’t even play now. 

[lemming]

I noticed when my network has minor issues, it hits CoH before anything else and usually the key is the noting my zoning times have increased.  Often, just resetting my router does the trick.

 

I'm also going thru a slight oddness is that I piggy back off my landlord's wifi, so occasionally I have asked her to reset hers.

 

Normally everything is pretty quick.

[Calculator]

With the client/server code being closed-source, I can't even begin to speculate on the cause of it here..but...

 

On EQEmu, we had a problem where peoples' inventories became so large that they would timeout on zone-in.

 

This seemed to only affect certain people and the problem was traced to a player's ISP throttling their data transfers.

 

Critical parts of the zone-in process were being dumped by the ISP because the transfer rate for that given period exceeded the customer's bandwidth cap. To wit: major parts of the client's inventory packets were missing, including the portion that advanced the loading stage in the client software.

 

Having that person clear out their inventory resulted in them being able to complete the zone-in process once again.

 

I'm not recommending that people rush out to change their ISPs..but, maybe the devs could shine some light on this?