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

[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.