Server Lag!

[the Crazed]

What's with the weird lag lately?  It freezes up when people join the server and intermittently throughout the game.  I'm pretty sure quite a few people are experiencing it.  I've heard a theory that it could be caused from all the servers that are running... any truth to that?

It's a nuisance in ffa.. but in tdm I ... get... SO... VERY .... FRUSTRATED!!!!!! 

And... I start whining... yes, yes, I know... me of all people... whining!! 

Anyways, curious about who, what, when, where, why, and how to fix it ... but don't worry, I'm resigned to living with it if I have to

[Om3ga]

  please dont eat me! (jp)

strange! i just pulled up my gamespy3d favorites list, and the servers seem to be running at pings in the 30's and 40's !

Remember i ran that railz server, element, adam, and gator were lagging pretty bad, and my network has some users, using it. yourre right man, that could be the problem  .  console  ???

[console]

What's with the weird lag lately?  It freezes up when people join the server and intermittently throughout the game.  I'm pretty sure quite a few people are experiencing it.  I've heard a theory that it could be caused from all the servers that are running... any truth to that?

Crazed, thanks for giving me lag feedback on tourney while I could be in-game myself.

I found I'm seeing only a fraction of the lag that you were reporting.  The server CPU was usually between 20% to 30% idle.  My netgraph was completely clean, and flat, most of the time.

Although I was only seeing a fraction of the lag you were reporting, here's what I did see:

  - 1 instance of lag when someone connected mid-game and my q2 client paused
     while loading their skin/model data
  - a few rare tiny glitches that showed up in netgraph as small bumps
  - 1 instance of packetloss (i was surprised, that was the only packetloss I saw in
     about a half hour of connect time)
  - 1 moment when the CPU hit 0.0% idle and multiple people in game reported lag

The latter one surprised me.  The server can go to 0% idle when people are posting on the forums for instance, for brief moments in time; but the web server and databases run at an extremely low priority compared to the quake servers... so normally this isn't a cause of lag.

Anyway, the overall sense that I'm getting is:

  a) Something in your route to the server and/or on your local system is causing
       you to see more lag than I think the server itself is responsible for (based on
       my being connected to the server at the same time as you and not seeing
       nearly the same degree of lag.)

  b) We're getting pretty close to maxxing out the server CPU.  But I think it's not
       at the point where this is the cause of more than very occasional minor
       glitches (because during the half hour I was connected, I hardly saw any lag
       and was watching the CPU meter and it rarely dipped below 20% idle.)

One thing you might try is the R1Q2 client.  I'd be interested to know whether you noticed any improvement.  It uses a more efficient network protocol, and also contains some code optimizations in the client.  No guarantee it will help, but that's what I'm using, and we're both connecting to the server from San Diego from the same ISP - so that strikes me as one difference we could eliminate for diagnostic purposes.


Regards,

[X'tyfe]

you sure you wernt just downloading alot of pr0n? 

[Laurelin]

g0at-pr0n most likely.

[KobraKlaws]

The same thing has been happening to me the past month if that makes you feel any better about it.  But the good thing is that my ping is now at a record low on the tastyspleen servers.

The "lag" sometimes happens when a player joins a game.  Quake II kind of locks up with the sound that is playing at the time repeating.  A message saying someone connected is always shown when it lets me play again.

Kind of odd, but I'm used to it now.

[Slikkster]

I use r1q2, and I've been noticing "lag", if that's the right word for it.  I would rather describe it as unsmooth video, where some players might be in one place, and then rather than a continuous run to their next location, it's a bit of a pause and then the video races to get back to where it should be.  This is occasionally on Railz. 

[[BTF]Defiant!]

I use r1q2, and I've been noticing "lag", if that's the right word for it.  I would rather describe it as unsmooth video, where some players might be in one place, and then rather than a continuous run to their next location, it's a bit of a pause and then the video races to get back to where it should be.  This is occasionally on Railz. 

What do you find with

netgraph 1

Sounds like you are saying there is server-side lag.  CPU or remotely possibly server side I/O or network.

Def

[Bleach]

I use r1q2, and I've been noticing "lag", if that's the right word for it.

[the Crazed]

I use r1q2, and I've been noticing "lag", if that's the right word for it.