speeding up zoning?
 

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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. :)

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

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

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

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

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