LOOONG Zoning Times

[mcaden]

There a reason why it takes sometimes 5 mins to load a zone? I'm talking 5 mins, THEN the loading bar pops up and loads it in 5-10 seconds.

I've been told by one person that this isn't just me, it's many people, so I'm assuming there's something wrong with the server code.

Can somebody confirm it's not just me before I go poring through source code trying to fix it.

My old AMD K62 450 ran EQ better than this.

[trevius]

If you are running a Dual Core CPU, you might want to check out this post:

http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/showthread.php?t=25327

If not, you might want to try another server and see if your problem happens on all servers. I have heard that loading times can increase or decrease depending on the server you are playing on. If you are zoning into a zone that no one else is in, then the server has to boot that zone before you can enter it. That could be the reason why it is taking so long for you. But, I have never seen it take more than a few seconds on my server.

[mcaden]

I'm single-core, and actual zoning is extremely fast, like I said, roughly 5-10 seconds (related to disk-seeks I assume, of which there really hasn't been a speed increase - motors still topping out most of the time at 7600 RPM(? - may be slightly off...this is top-of-my-head)). It's just a few minutes wait where it does absolutely nothing that gets me.

Lately I've been playing on a server that hasn't had more than ~7 people on when I am so it probably is that the zone is sleeping.

There has to be a better way of putting zones to sleep/waking them up, otherwise how could a server 10 years ago survive with thousands of players online. My desktop atm is loads more powerful than anything from 10 years ago when EQ first came out and these dedicated servers are much more than my computer which hasn't been upgraded in 2 years (AMD Athlon 3200+ 64-bit with 2 gig DDR RAM running dual-channel and a nVidia 7600GT).

I think EQEmu has done an awesome job of emulating EQ, I just feel that it should be able to support more players, and more zones up. I'm seeing things like if players are AE'ing it'll bring a zone down. This means to me that the zone code needs to be drastically reworked. While it's not necessarily a good idea - servers *SHOULD* be able to run with every zone going at the same time.

If I get a chance I'll take a look at it. I start work back up in about 2 weeks, in-laws are coming to visit, I have a 1-week-old baby that screws up my sleep, and I'm working on another video game project soo...it may be a few days. :P I do also realize that the reality of the code is probably VERY different than what's in my head, so it may not be a simple restructure of the code but an entirely new Emu.

[trevius]

Most servers are ran from people's home PCs, not what you would normally consider a dedicated server. Normally dedicated server is referring to a server that is hosted in a datacenter that costs a monthy fee to keep running. I think there may be a couple that are hosted dedicated servers, but most of them are not.

Multiple things contribute to zone load times and zone stability. The servers can be set to start all zones statically, which means that they are always up, but it is more resource heavy and if the zone crashes it can only restart as dynamic anyway. But, really the way that the emu handles dynamic zones isn't bad at all. I know on my server that it can boot a zone in just a few seconds. Maybe the server you are on needs to add more ports to their router and to their dynamic port range. My server always has 50 dynamic zones booted so they are ready to load any zone that any players decide to zone into. Normally I only have 10 or 12 zones actually being used at once though.

For zone stability, there are certain things that can make a pretty good impact on helping. For the most part though, I think processor power is probably the most important for calculating all of the hits and exp etc. I think that rampage AE is probably the worst of all, since it causes a ton of calculations to be done all at once. I know my server can handle around 30ish rampage AE targets before it gets too risky and it could probably handle more for spell AE damage. But, my processor is only a 3700 on my server, so it could definitely use an upgrade with double the speed or more. I figured I would mention that just to give an idea of the performance I see.

[mcaden]

currently I'm playing on Jest4

[KLS]

Zone bootup can delay it, but not by 5 minutes; the client would time out before then. Odds are the connection between client and server isn't great, either heavy packet loss or kinda slow. The client has to receive quite a bit of data from the server as well as load the zone files before it releases control to the user.

For me with zone caching on and on my local server I can load any given zone in 10-15 seconds.

[mcaden]

Hmm...it's down to 2 minutes now.

I think it's probably packet loss if nobody else is having it near as bad as I am. I'm located in China.