f13.net

Natch, anybody else getting this?

The first time I start up the game for a session, the login is really slow, it takes time for the character select screen to come up and then it takes more time for me to choose and load a character. Once in game, the lag is insane.

Now, if I log out, quit and restart the game, everything's a s snappy as it should be, considering this is still a game in early beta, but it works. Why the latency and pokiness on the initial login?

How much RAM do you have?

I get this as well.  I can't remember the last time I saw my characters at the select screen since I just select the name and keep on going.  This is with 2 gigs of RAM.

Have you tried rebooting your machine, not launching any apps, and then running LOTRO? The symptoms you guys describe is almost certainly Windows thrashing about swapping things to the swap file to make room for LOTRO in memory. Do you guys have dynamic (i.e. "system managed") or fixed sized swap files? If they are dynamic you should try it with the swap file at a fixed size.

I have 2 GB of RAM as well and I don't see this problem except for a few seconds when I first enter the world and it's still loading textures and stuff into memory.

I thought it might have been 'doze on my machine as well (which had 2 gigs of RAM), but I got the same results on my new rig with four gigs of RAM and a spanking new install of the OS.

My situation is like Trippy's, it is only slow due to loading graphics and even then it's not bad.  Character login/creation is pretty snappy for me.  My geriatric rig only has 1.5GB of RAM.  Maybe it's the GFX card?  I have a GF 6800 256MB and I run the game at 1280x960 or some such, but not with all of the candy enabled.

Highly unlikely it's the graphics card. The GPU memory is cleared when you quit the game. Therefore if it is the GPU memory (or lack thereof) you should get the same behavior everytime you run the game. The fact that it's slow the first time you launch the game but fine the second time and the game isn't creating any sort of game cache files on disc that I can see (like how BF2 rebuilds certain data files everytime you touch the graphic settings) tells me it's an OS issue and like I said almost certainly a swap file issue of some sort.

What are your virtual memory settings?

I'm inclined to agree with this.  It sounds like disk thrashing on my machine.  I have a fixed sized swap file but I can't remember the last time I rebooted it.  I bring it up from hibernate everyday which isn't the same thing.  I mostly just ignore since it doesn't affect game play at all. 

I guess if I cared I’d walk all the way downstairs, reboot my machine and try but there is that flight of stairs to think about and then I’d probably have to move my luggage I just dropped in front of the door.  This could take all day so I’ll just sit here a bit.

You don't sit anywhere close to your machine? Also, why can't you just soft-reboot from Windows?

I have computers sprinkled around the house.  My gaming one is downstairs.

My virtual memory settings are set for highest performance.

What's the Virtual Memory setting to go with? I remember it being 2xRAM or something like that.

Wrong screen. You want to go to:

My Computer (right click) -> Properties -> Advanced (tab) -> Performance (Settings) -> Advanced (tab) -> Virtual Memory (Change)

(http://www.pandadesigns.com/f13/virtual_memory.gif)

Note that while some virtual memory settings guides suggest you move your swap file off your C: drive (or wherever Windows is located) if you have multiple hard drives mine is still there because my D: drive is used by my PVR software so I don't want any OS related disc thrashing to cause "hiccups" in my recordings.

Mine is currently set to the Windows recommended amount. 2 x RAM is a rough rule of thumb but it depends on how many apps you like to have loaded simulatenously.

Having a page file with a size based on RAM is something I find silly.  If you have more RAM, you need less paging space.  It really comes down to how overcomitted you are.  Even people you think would know better (SAP AG) use the "multiple of RAM" rule, which is rather ridiculous if you have enough RAM to run everything in real memory.  You do want some for spillover, of course, but 2 or 3 times RAM is silly if your machine is properly sized.

You are assuming the Windows paging algorithm actually makes sense, which it doesn't, or at least it doesn't at first glance. E.g. I have 1.5 MB of RAM free at the moment and yet Windows is using 640 MB of page file space and it's going up at the moment (20 MB in the time it took to write this). I.e. Windows is actively writing stuff there even though I have gobs and gobs of RAM free. I originally had my page file at 2 GB but I recently saw that it somehow got up to 1.4 GB for some inexplicible reason so I bumped it up to the recommended 3 GB.

And actually after I first built this computer I "turned off" the page file since I have 2 GB of RAM and yet Windows still created a page file behind my back and was using it constantly so I went back to the fixed size technique.

You got me there.  In my world, things are loaded into RAM and kept there until it runs low.  If OS and apps don't consume all RAM, the rest is used for filecache.  Paging space is untouched until a low RAM condition is reached.  You can specify exactly what that is, too.  And more.  DOS makes me groan.


You commented on this before so I also went back to the static pagefile.  Also the Titan Quest demo refused to run without virtual memory.