I came back to wow last week. Same old story mostly with the lag in raids and major cities. 800ms+ in cities, and spikes leading to DC in raid.

Especially TOC25 normal -- Gormok = DC (guaranteed), then cannot log back on without insta-DC again. Random DCs and generally lagginess including MASSIVE FPS lag on most boss fights. Anub was like a 3fps lag fiesta.

Luckily, <LoTH> has its own tunneling servers that its raiders can enjoy, and this definitely helped. But still LOTS of random lag, DCs and fps problems. And, the very frequent "server hopping" to find a "well behaved" tunneling server, would often take the joy out of the game.

Imagine in raid, "Hang on, give me 5 minutes, i need to find a good server to switch to". Damn embarassing to have 24 people wait on you.

I think my situation has just about described the scenario a lot of us are facing. Game is somewhat playable, but only if a good tunneling service is used.

So i did some research to find out what the problem was. Ever since the latest patches have been released, many people are feeling the same. My digging revealed some changes i could make to improve my experience. So i made these changes last night for my first togc25 heroic, and OOOOOHHHHBOOOOY did they make a helluva of a big difference.

Here is what i did.

1. Remove Recount. Some guildies said that disabling synching in Recount helps, so if you insist on keeping Recount loaded (or any other combat log tracker), you can type to disable it from trying to synch with other players' Recount.

2. Disable Blizzard Combat Log.

Right-click your combat log tab. "Self", "What happened to me", "Everything". Click on each of those, and then click through each of the sub-tabs and disable EVERYTHING. Make it so that NOTHING appears on your combat log.

I had Scrolling Combat Text installed, and that still worked fine even with my combat log off.

3. Install this addon. http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/...on-spam-fu.aspx

This amazing addon allows you to monitor addon message traffic from your raid members. What you want to do is to MINIMIZE this traffic.

For me, making this change was the LARGEST single factor that made everything run so smoothly last night.

Many addons have secret "whisper" programs that we cannot see. They whisper other players in the raid/party for all sorts of information. Pallypower wants to find out who is buffing who, or who needs a buff. Healbot wants to find out if your current heal target is receiving an incoming heal from another source. Gearscore whispers you to find out what your gear is like. DBM whispers you "MOVE OUT OF THE FIRE NUBCAKE". etc etc etc.

The problem is, many of these mods do the whispering extremely inefficiently, thus leading to massive, MASSIVE spamming of your client with data.

A mod like Gearscore (stupidest ever mod ever created) spams you with whisper requests every second ALL the time, and because your client response is pretty large (info about all your gear), thats a heck of a lot of traffic moving between you and the other player with Gearscore installed. Imagine both of you have Gearscore installed. You'll be spamming each other with requests and data. The only way to block the spam is /ignore, but that's something you can't really do in a raid.

WORSE still, mods like Gearscore not only affect the performance of the person who has it installed, it adversely affects the person who DOESN'T have it installed -- the mod spams you with data and requests, and if your connection cannot take the load, then you will DC; the person with the mod installed may have a better connection and therefore may not lag or get DC'ed.

So last night, i ran this mod and found half a dozen people in the raid with offending mods that were practically spamming the raid with data/requests. A raider with just DBM installed has a footprint of just 200-300bytes (multiply that by 25, and its still hardly 5kb of data a second -- most connections can handle that no problem).

The following is QUOTED for emphasis:



In our raid, the worse offender was Gearscore. It was a massive data spammer. We got everyone to switch it off. The addon lets us know in real-time how much data spam is coming and going, so even when we had to swap raiders later on in the night, we could monitor the newcomers and told them which mods we wanted them to switch off (Gatherer is another big offender).

And that's all i did.

Last night, LoTH tunnels were acting up, so i had to raid without them. I RAIDED WITHOUT TUNNELS. Never thought i'd hear myself say that.

Result: 25man TOGC 400ms smooth as silk throughout the whole night (up to Faction Champs). Had one DC at the end during Anub when we did 25man TOC, but that's to be expected i suppose -- Streamyx still sucks, nothing will change that. But otherwise, one DC the whole night? Smooth gameplay for the other 4 hours? Yes pls.

DISCLAIMER: I don't guarantee that these steps will work for you. I'm just sharing my experiences. It worked for ME and my raid (overall, fewer DCs last night than normal, no doubt thanks to identifying which addons were spamming the raid). If it doesn't work for you, pls don't shoot the messenger.

If this works for you, please help spread the word to your guild and/or other Malaysians who are suffering like we are.

NOTE: My PC is 3-years old. Top of the line back then, but quite dated now. 2GB ram, 7800GTX graphics card. I live in Kota Damansara, my IP address is always 115.xxx.xxx.xxx can never get anything different.

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Added on October 1, 2009, 9:49 ambtw, this is where i got most of the info for this.

http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t40955-wow_per...tweaks_etc/p21/

Didn't bother with the registry hack (coz i'm dumb and dunno how to do it).

This post has been edited by Tentris: Oct 1 2009, 09:49 AM

The registry hack is not something new, it used to be 2 parter - Disables the Nagle algorithm (which Blizzard has already patched in dunno how many years back) and the TcpAckFrequency. The latter is client side so Blizzard cannot do anything about it. Basically just tells your Windows to wait how long before replying. Default is 2, but it's recommended to change to 1 (min value) for latency sensitive games like WoW.

I'm not sure about the rest of you, but my gripe with TMnet nowadays is not about the latency, but the bandwidth. And only to certain networks (unfortunately WoW server is one of them). What happens is, I ping and get very nice latency, only 200ms or so. In-game it's about 400ms. But I couldn't log when my toon is in Dalaran at all. I can play 5-men fine, but 25-men is DC hell. This all points to bandwidth and not latency issue.

I tested with speednet, bandwidth to LA is around 100kb/s, but bandwidth to San Diego is only a mere 3kb/s or so. I'm not sure where WoW servers are located (I thought it's LA), but this kinda prove that TMnet is utilising some sort of selective bandwidth to servers. This also explains why my Rapidshare downloads are going super slow on certain servers but super fast on others.

Oh, I have a confession. I use GearScore as well.
I'll make sure to turn it off when raid starts if got ppl DC. (IMO GS is still useful if you're Pugging, always safer to have a 5k GS nub than a 3k GS nub, and no way I'm going to run ToC10 with 5 3k GS nub no matter if they've killed Algalon on their mains... There's still this thing called Gear Check!)

Check your server here.

http://www.wowwiki.com/US_realm_list_by_datacenter

On a side note, Gearscore is so crap not only because its a terribly inefficient mod that soaks up bandwidth from not just yourself but FROM YOUR WHOLE RAID, the principle behind it is selfish, terrible and downright unfriendly.

I can't really confirm if it's Recount & Combat log that caused problem...

however, after I've disabled both (and also DeadlyBossMode) as TS suggestd... I can log in and play!

My Addons:
01) Titan Panel
02) Omni
03) Pearl
04) Rating Buster
05) QuestHelper
06) Broker BonusScanner
07) Fishing Buddy
08) Decursive
09) CTMod3

This post has been edited by penman: Oct 1 2009, 01:12 PM

rantic smells

neat information here

The Nagle algorithm was only disabled on the server side. You still need to do it on your side (client) to be able to feel the difference. Recount has always been knows to be a resource hogger, whether RAM or bandwidth. Nothing new =)

I was exploring your suggestion and found that it would be easier if you just delete the 3 filters. After the fight, just click "combat log defaults" and it will restore back to normal.

Same outcome as what you mentioned, just not so tedious and faster way to get it done

Awesome info, thanks for sharing!

i stay in kota damansara area too, and i've been living off 200-300ms constantly over the past 3 months. Gamepath was one reason but even without, i could get around 400-450ms stable with zero dc.

unnecessary mods during a raid is just unnecessary, thats it. simple, the only person with a recount if he needs it is the asst RL. the others should have minimum add ons cum raid. you bloody don't need gladius, questhelper, carto, gatherer etc etc on the raid, so for the benefit of the greater raid experience i just wish raiders or pugs would give a damn and switch it off without being told to.

but like all selfish nature, they tend to be lazy to logoff, disable and login. sad..but true