speeding up zoning?

[jdx]

What if there was some way to make / rebuild uncompressed versions of the .s3d or .eqg files? I can't see any reason why zoning in EQ is so slow other than the fact the zone and graphic files are compressed. Network latency and bandwidth doesn't seem to be the issue.

[vossiewulf]

EQ running off an SSD drive make zoning very fast for me, frequently just a few seconds. Yes that solution costs money, but it's an option to consider if the loading speed is really annoying to you.

[jdx]

I have a revodrive (pci-e based ssd) and zoning still has considerable time to it. Given the simplicity of a "zone", the requisite time to generate and render the zone is pretty crazy for a 13 year old game running on CPUs that are probably (easily) 10x what the system requirements were when the game came out. Not to mention unlimited amounts of ram to play with.

If somebody zones into someplace, then zones back out, then zones in again, the files are going to be entirely cached into system memory which is 10x to 100x faster (depending on how good/bad your ssd is) than an SSD anyway, yet zoning is still sometimes a 10-15 second experience. The only "fast" zones I see are zoning into FelwitheA (tiny zone, makes sense).

I haven't done in-depth IO analysis yet, but knowing the zone files and graphics are highy compressed and assuming the decompression algorithm probably completely sucks, I imagine the bottleneck has to be in dealing with the zone files and graphics. I'm more than willing to trade space for speed since space is cheap... just gotta figure out how to rebuild these files :)

[Rogean]

Revodrive is software driver driven raid. You're adding a cpu overhead on to something that is already a very cpu intensive application (everquest never utilized gpu's to their potential, and did most graphics processing via the cpu).

I have an overclocked 4 ghz processor with two velociraptors in a raid 0 and I zone in about 5-10 seconds.

[jdx]

I wouldn't exactly call EQ a cpu-intensive program. Look at resource monitor or perfmon when you zone.

While zoning back and forth into gfay from BB, on my crappiest box with slowest CPU (affinity set to a single core on a dual core processor), the biggest "spike" i see only hits 50% for a literally a split second during the 15-18 seconds it takes to zone. The CPU is basically flatline the rest of the time. I guess my closer analysis just now has ruled out s3d / eqg file compression as the bottleneck being that the CPU isn't doing anything for the majority of the time.

So what the heck is it doing for the other 16-17 seconds? Some forced wait in the client?

PS. Revodrive may technically be driven by a "software" raid controller chip, but it's gonna run circles around your velo setup with CPU time to spare. :)

[Nomura]

It takes me about 2 to 3 minutes to zone ;/

[Gorgetrapper]

I thought zone load speed was tied in to what the RPMs on your HD were?

[Haynar]

Talking to people who have gone SSD, compared to loading tons of textures into the global load. They have been happier using SSD to get faster zone times. Make sure you are using a fast video card, cpu, and have plenty of memory. Any one of those things can be the bottleneck too. EQ is not super video card dependent, but loading up textures on a slow card, takes a lot of time. So going low end video, will slow down your loading tons, even if EQ does not need video power.

The textures kill ya.

H

[Mcbard]

I zone anywhere between 5-10 secs with my SSD. :)

[runlvlzero]

Revodrive is software driver driven raid. You're adding a cpu overhead on to something that is already a very cpu intensive application (everquest never utilized gpu's to their potential, and did most graphics processing via the cpu).

I have an overclocked 4 ghz processor with two velociraptors in a raid 0 and I zone in about 5-10 seconds.

no raid and on a good day that's the time i zone too, i think thats the min time it takes for the network code to punch you through to the other server shards ... if it works that way P

[jdx]

What makes me think it's a forced wait on the client is because the window will freeze and will go into "not responding" mode after about 5 seconds of hitting a zoneline. That happens under 1 of 2 possible conditions for programs:

1) The client code executed the sleep() function for a fixed amount of time and the executable is essentially frozen (windows thinks its hung, hence the "not responding" text in the titlebar if you try clicking and moving the window while its frozen for zoning.

or

2) The client is doing SO much work that it can't process anything else - usually accompanied by 100% cpu usage.

Since we're NOT seeing any extraneous disk usage, cpu usage, or bandwidth utilization, I doubt it's #2. It's gotta be a sleep() in the client to prevent people from exploiting zonelines for quick aggro-drop.

My brother and I setup our own eqemu server to see what was going on server-side. It takes no time at all to transfer a character from one zone connection to another...

One other 3rd possibility could be that the client (being 13 years old) is using mostly non-asynchronous network functions. I have a hard time with that one since the game updates are UDP based (connectionless) and the connection transfers during zoning happen really fast so even if it was non-async it shouldn't be a show-stopper for so long.

This is like one of life's grand mysteries.. why does EQ zone so slow... lol

[Vonkaar]

Good lord, I zone in a few seconds... every single zone, every single time... I can't imagine waiting minutes between zones. In the old days I know it felt like forever, but I doubt it was minutes, maybe 30-45 seconds for busy zones.

My system is:
Windows 7
4.15 Ghz Core i7
12gb DDR3 2133
6-drive RAID0 SATA2
ATI 5870 at some random overclock
Squishy mousepad

I always just assumed that it was good data read rate that allows for fast zoning. Break out performance monitor and watch for spikes when you zone. Do you run EQ in windowed mode?

[Ozudin]

It takes me about 15 seconds at the most to zone with EQ loaded on a bottom of the line ssd on my laptop. I think that is completely acceptable and I'm a reasonably busy guy with not allot of time to spare.

Brian Regan; Listen, if you need to zap fry your Pop-Tarts before you head out the door, you might wanna loosen up your schedule

[Lazortag]

I think 15 seconds in the magic number. That's how long it takes me to zone most of the time. I think that's still pretty slow and I would like it to go faster.