New Install & SA Lag from scratch

SnowWar

SnowWar

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Hey all,

Ok so I just bought a new timecard for wow again (after 2 months)
Connected with my Afrihost DSL acct
and I patched my wow on my newly installed Windows 7 x64
Installed and setup proxifier & lowerping
Updated my addons and started wow

My toon was still in Icecrown where I left him. My ping standing there was 291ms. Things looked good then.

Then I started doing some HC farming and well latency was moving around from 290-480ish with some spikes. Being healer one does really notice it. Imagine how it would be in 25 man... (could not test it last night)

I then h'd to Dalaran and well Wow was crawling there, giving me like 2 fps and DCing me after a while. In general Wow just stayed like that in dala the whole night.
That made me wonder and I think its probly an addon or something causing that. And that it might be affecting my latency in hc's also.

So tonight I will be doing the TcpAck thing and seeing how I can go about tuning things (fix addons, run with no addons etc). I will also connect with a normal telkom acct, and unshaped telkom acct, 626 & semi-shaped accts and I will report back on how it goes.

Tbh, I did not expect everything to be smooth when comming back after 2 months, specially not in the addons department. But I've heard allot of people saying something is not quite right after the latest few patches.
Definately the Afrihost (which is actually suppose to be a standard IS Semi-shaped acct) did not perform like it did before I left. Granted it might be other things causing probems also.

I heard one should turn down shadows a bit as the full setting currently cause problems. I will do that 2night also.

Cya 2morrow regarding this then
 
It murders any system... Even on my system I turn shadows only up one notch.

Anyway, I am making good progress on troubleshooting the evil DC bastard demon. Quite a lot of things seem to be broken. And its affecting long distance players more than anyone else. I am more than ever convinced Blizzard finetuned the buffer stack code on their servers to tune it for better performance.

There are speculations that they believe the blizzard servers use an input buffer of something along the lines of 32KBytes serverside per client connecting. Now that value might have been dropped to finetune server performance and cater for the larger number of raiding players playing nowdays.

If my solution works, its not gonna be nice and clean, but the only way to test it would be this week if I manage to get a raid spot after my disastrous trial week of PSU's blowing up and DC's like crazy on critical events in raids...
 
A guild willing to spend time while you experiment with 24 other guild members is not only rare, it's an achievement of note.
I think that I am going to have to call it quits, because, in order to progress in WoW I must either:
- play in Arena Teams
- play in 25 man raids

Neither of which is plausible with this latency, unless we can actually get a real working solution up and running.
I am willing to work with anybody to try to find a solution.
 
I'll be taking it step by step again as I was in this situation previously with the start of wotlk and sorted it and raided everything perferctly up to the tournament sh#t, thou it was mostly on unshaped saix.

I know what to look for while I'm raiding, evening doing a VOA 25 pug there is things. So I'll do and test it on my side and you all look into your things further and we see what we get @.

Its just very shocking the amount of people having problems after 3.2.2, not just SA'cans.
 
and I patched my wow on my newly installed Windows 7 x64 <---Your problem
First windows 7 hates wow and 64bit made i worse.
Run vista 32bit with sp2 and you be playing 350ms 25 man raids like i do in no time :)
 
I am running Windows 7 64 Bit and I dont have issues with WoW.
Latencies are exactly the same as my previous Windows XP 32 bit edition.

What I do have issues with however is :

MSN Live messenger just does not work for me. Says the ports are closed on the firewall and even switching off ALL firewalls does nothing. It just cant connect.
My sockscap tunneling software doesnt work under 64bit
Freecap doesnt work under windows 7 64 bit for me...
Widecap works BUT its all or nothing. I have to channel all my connections / traffic through the proxy.
My Audigy 2ZS sound card is totally b0rg3d... gameport has NO driver supported under Windows 7 64bit.... only 2 front speakers playing sound, microphone just plain refuses to work under Windows 7 on that Creative Audigy Windows 7 driver.
Edit ** - Killernic has no supported driver for Windows 7 for the K1 / M1 models either. Sitting with a very expensive network card paperweight on my desk now.
 
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not enough problems to convince you that windows 7 64bit sux? o.0

my internet use to buffer all the time play 5 sec then stand still for 5 sec,i know there a fix but pretty crap and probably would use more bandwidth
 
I have to chew through the problems...I hate it, I really do, but what are my other options ? Vista that slow overbloated OS which hogs hardware resources ? or the Jurassic XP :(

Problem is... I am running very state of the art equipment. And old OS on new hardware is not always optimal. Just the performance gains on the SSD side from running on Windows 7 vs Windows Xp is insane.

But its to be expected... there will be tons of teething issues on Windows 7 as it matures, of that I am 100% certain.
 
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Actually from the research I did on Win7 before installing Wow is that the people who did test had about 10% better fps & latency running Win7 64bit, so I doubt its the problem.

I used to run on Win XP with an 250+-ms latency, but that was after fine tuning it. It was time to restall and I'm trying Win7, besides I did not think I was comming back to Wow.

Anyway, I dont think Win7 is the problem @ all. I'll sort it
 
I have Windows 7 64bit as well. I do not have lag issues unless it is in 25man where a lot of stuff happen.

I'm pretty convinced the problem is with our internet to international sites...

Which I could get a ADSL account that runs over the Seacom cable to test.
 
Its definately not windows 7... 1000000 % sure of that. Had these DC's on my XP 32 bit installation as well.

Its the manner in which the WoW servers will disconnect you, if you generate too much output.

They have found in testing, that a data rate of 3000 CPS will cause a disconnect if sustained for more than a few seconds. There seems to be an input buffer of something along the lines of 32KBytes serverside. Filling it would be what causes the kick.

A total output of 2000 CPS seems safe.

Its mainly in heavy AOE conditions... Problem is, not all addons are written with proper ChatThrottleLib support... and those are the guys murdering your connection. Your GearScore checker addons, your carbonite users, the list goes on and on.
 
Rite so I got pissed with my Windows 7 x64 RC build last night. Never mind what I did I still got absolute **** fps around Wow and specially in dalaran (I think maybe its something with the hardware/windows rc build, thou I have a newish pc) & my latency with an Afrihost or 626 acct was always 450ms with spikes to 900. But anyway I'll install Win7 again when its released.

So as I said I got pissed, installed my old WinXP Sp2, loaded Lowerping with putty & SocksCapv2 and started Wow and their I was standing in Dalaran with 80fps looking @ the green connection icon saying 279ms.
I was flying around wow casting heals etc and unlike on Win7 the latency stayed like that. It was around 11 last night so I will test it again tonight and do some 25 mans.

Not quite sure wtf, but I'll get back to you on this. Atleast its a good start
 
You have to use the leatrix registry fix script to do your Windows 7 registry tweak though. Its been modified for Windows 7 support. Also the only proxying software I found that works properly with windows 7 is widecap.

So it might have been your tunneling software... when you run any of the other tunneling clients, wow still start up and run, but it bypasses your tunnel. Widecap if you force ALL your connections through the proxy it should be fine. If you want to test my statement, connect on windows 7 via your tunnel, and once you are in game, disconnect your putty session. You should disconnect if the traffic is tunneled via the putty daemon. In my case, it did'nt... but when I used widecap, my latency dropped like a brick in water.

As for your FPS in dalaran... have you modified your processor affinity mask setting yet ? And also did you modify your default texturing cache value ?
Remember wow is a old game now, and it was written in the old days to support old junky pc's. Just by increasing your texturing memory space from 32 meg ram to 128 meg ram, my overal dalaran has been a LOT smoother and faster.
 
Hey Pornolio,

I do always use the leatrix fix
Regarding tunneling software I've used proxifier & proxycap on win7 and with proxifier u can actually see the amount of data being used, and yes when u close putty your connection drops, so I know its working. There is something else wrong.

I read if you have < 4GB ram use Win 7 32bit and > 4GB ram use 64 bit. Dunno if its true or a must, but I only had 2GB at the time (1 stick was faulty and I have to replace it)

Regarding the other technical ****, well I dont know 2 much about that, so can you helpout there maybe?
- How do I change my processor affinity mask setting?
- How do I change my texturing memory space from 32 meg ram to 128 meg ram?

My one friends installed the newest Win 7 64bit he could find, ran leatrix & lowerping and his is working fine, good FPS & 280ms latency. (he did not even change anything like the affinity & memory) I'm sure it was just something with the Win7 version I had.

So now when Win 7 actually gets released later the month what version do u think I should get/install? I'd think 64bit, but only have 2GB for now. (will only get another 2 later, so lets work on just 2GB)
Running a 3.2ghz Dual Core, HD4850, 2GB Ram etc.
I just want to run WOW optimal (I know its working fine on XP now but I want Win7 and I know it can and does actually work fine)

Thx
 
Ok... if you are using the Leatrix registry mod then it definately was not that.

As for the tunneling software, weird. I tried pretty much every single piece of tunneling software I know of on the 64bit version, and it refused to tunnel properly. Disconnecting putty I could play fine and my latency did'nt budge.

Only with widecap could I run stable at 240 ms.

Ok your other questions...

Processor affinity mask is a setting you can modify if you run on very newish updated pc (latest AMD's or Intel i7). The problem with wow is, it will grab the first two cpu's it can, and use them for processing. Now this is all great, but what you have to realise is, your OS uses the first CPU for most of its important processing, and the other cores for other functions. This results in most cases if your CPU has hyperthreading support your WOW takes cpu 1 + cpu 2 and in that case your wow is effectively running on 1 cpu core since the second cpu is still a virtual hyperthread and at the same time its contending for cpu time from the OS.

So by modifying an entry in your config.wtf file you can force wow to use core 3 / 4 (meaning two physical cpu cores purely for its own exclusive use).
In my case doing the mod meant a 30 FPS increase across the board in any given area and a way more smoother gaming experience.

For reference use the following guideline :
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1778017311

Next up texture caching :

Wow is a pretty old game and it was written in the old days when hardware was not really what they are today. WoW will only use 32 megs of ram for texture caching at most.

Patch 3.1 introduced a new setting called textureCacheSize.
What this does by the look of it, is cache textures in memory when they are not in use for quick loading. It supports up to 512 meg (default is 32 remember) but there is a big BUT here. WoW is still a 32 bit application, meaning you cannot overspend on memory usage for the application... once you reach the 2 gig memory allocation limit you end up crashing your wow.
WoW loaded with all addons and crap sits around 1.3 gig most of the time.
So increasing the limit to say 128 meg did wonders for me in general dalaran performance. A fellow guildy of mine tried it and he also scored massive improvements. It all depends on your system. I did'nt gain FPS, but I did gain smoother movement / loading / caching and better overall dalaran performance.

You can do it in game via the following command :

512 megs: /console textureCacheSize 536870912 (Maximum)
128 megs: /console textureCacheSize 134217728
64 megs: /console textureCacheSize 67108864
32 megs (Default): /console textureCacheSize 33554432
16 megs (Multibox/Low End): /console textureCacheSize 16777216
8 megs (Low End Multibox): /console textureCacheSize 8388608 (Minimum)

Or just add it to your config.wtf file to load it upon login time.

SET textureCacheSize "134217728"

The 4 gig debate is the OS limitation. 32 Bit OS can only use up to 3 gigs of ram, so if you run a system like me with 6 gigs, you end up not using half your ram. If you run more than 3 gigs, then 64bit is your only safe bet.
There are workarounds to run applications in seperate memory spaces to get around the whole 3 gig memory limitation but its very buggy and bluescreens will stare you in the face often... so yes. Dont fight the inevitable ... upgrade to 64bit if your hardware supports it.

As for the windows 7 version you mentioned ... yes I tend to agree, there is tons of versions floating around and my version is the one from MSDN. So different behaviours are to be expected. I have a lot of little annoying issues with my Windows 7, but I tend to think my version may not be a final release.
 
Shot for that bud. Very helpfull indeed. I will give Win 7 x64 a shot about when I get myself a released copy after the 22nd

I read on lowerping site that they found different proxy software tends to work for different people on Win7. Some can only get proxfier to work, others just proxycap etc. So its just about finding the one that works for you.
 
Just a quick update in syntax change once the new patch hits... this comes from the PTR and the response is from a Blizzard dev :

This information is in reference to the Graphics changes mentioned in the 3.3.0 Patch notes.

Quote :

We have added a new experimental feature to the D3D graphics engine to improve texture management (particularly on Windows XP). This is currently enabled by default on the PTR and can be reverted to the original behavior by adding the following line to your Config.WTF file:

SET gxApi "d3d9"


Also, the configuration variable ‘textureCacheSize’ is no longer used with the new backend. To set the cache size for the new backend, adjust the ‘gxTextureCacheSize’ variable. For example, to allow 128MB of GPU memory to be used for textures, add the following line to your Config.WTF file:

SET gxTextureCacheSize "128"

SOOOOOO if you added it under your config.wtf file remember to modify it once the new patch goes live !
 
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