64 player server laggier than usual tonight?

[Mister_Penguin]

Usually it runs well for me, but tonight it plays more like the coolest Powerpoint presentation ever

[Wyzcrak]

I had no lag.

[Xeil]

It's weird because sometimes i get aweful lag and other time no lag at all while other peopole are getting it.

[ABPositive]

Same for me. Laggier than ever. I turn around and it becomes a slideshow, sometimes down to 2 fps. On UA pub servers (32 players), it's smooth as glass, rock steady 60fps, so I don't think my comp is the pb. My processor does not peak... Not sure why, my ping was in the 50s, and everybody but one person had <100 ping.

[verbose]

Server was smooth all night for me.

Is your hard drive going nuts when you're slideshowing? You might be swapping, or having texture thrashing by having video settings too high for your video card/memory combination.

[Mister_Penguin]

My video settings are low.

[ABPositive]

Disk is not doing anything, except for the 20+ seconds that follow the start of the game. After that, no disk activity. I have 256MB of video RAM, 1GB of RAM. Again, it's usually very smooth (and it was smooth sat evening on TG's server). It seems that when I am facing a certain player, frame rates drop...

Just now the frame rate improved dramatically.. Even battles with 10+ soldiers around were smooth. Not sure what was going on, but it was not playable.

[Tempus]

FPS would have nothiing to do with the server.

[asch]

There is a difference between server (net) lag and video lag. FPS drops are usually because of your client machine. Occasionally you'll get a freeze time because your machine isn't handling all of the textures and needs to load more into memory.

Hopefully we've fixed our squadless kick mod that was causing some lag, so what we experienced Sun / Mon nights won't happen anymore.

[=Sarc=]

My SL that night had to leave because it got too laggy for him. He was fine before but then he said it got really bad all of a sudden. The rest of the squad wasn't having any problems. Maybe 64 is too much for the server.

[Telorn]

Unless TG changed the server the public server is played on, I've played in plenty of 64 player games with no lag and a ping of 20-35. However, last Sunday and Monday 'spikes' in my ping would continue to occur, and this was happening across the board (I'd look at the user list and see multiple people shoot up in ping, only to drop back down to normal levels a few seconds later). This was apparently due to a mod to kick lone wolf people, but has been removed/fixed as of this moment.

Last night I had no lag issues.

[ABPositive]

Originally Posted by Tempus

FPS would have nothiing to do with the server.

For most FPSs, I agree with that statement. In Call Of Duty, for example, I always have high FPS (60 fps), but I would sometimes witness network lag: soldiers warping around, soldiers off the ground, etc.

In Battlefield Vietnam, it was different. The server browser showed the server's processor speed. And I very clearly noticed that my FPS was a function of the server's processor and nb of players. When joining a 32 player game with a low-end server, I would always get low fps (10-20). With another 32 player game run by a higher-end server, with identical pings, I would get a smooth gameplay (fps 40 to 60).

I believe some of this ported over to Battlefield 2. Yesterday, I did not observe soldiers warping around or tanks flying. So it did not look like network lag or high ping. But every 10 seconds or so, my fps would drop dramatically. Very irritating when in close combat. So I thought my processor may be throttling due to high temp... So I left TG's server (I was not under the command of Tarpan :-) ). Went to another 64 player pub server, and it was much smoother, and I would have stayed if the players were not that dumb ;-) Not glass-smooth, but smoother, and I didnt notice the spikes avery 10 seconds.

Am not incriminating TG's server, I just think it's part of the equation. I will investigate further tonight, and install a throttle monitor to rule out processor throttle for good.

My rig: P4 3.4E, 1GB 3200LL Corsair RAM, X850XT. Settings in BF2 set to medium, except for high textures and 100% draw distance.

[Telorn]

Ever since the custom modes were installed (do not move commander/SL and kick non-squaded people) the server seems to have started having issues. The first few days before any modification was done, the server always ran smooth with 64 players and I never had an issue. But now, since last Sunday, I've always run into jitters, although much less now than on Sunday and Monday.

[Jeigh]

Yea it's been getting better bit by bit each day for me, but it could just be a coincidence

[asch]

Originally Posted by Telorn

Ever since the custom modes were installed (do not move commander/SL and kick non-squaded people) the server seems to have started having issues.

The no balance of COs & SLs was in place before most ppl knew it and there weren't any lag issues I recognized. It didn't become apparent until the squadless kick was put in place. That does not mean the other mods couldn't be causing a problem either, or the combination of them. Once we updated the squadless kick I have not seen any server problems.