speeding up zoning?

[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