Ve~ry long loading times since b262

[AwE]Sentinel

Hi there.

After release and before b262, my loading times got worse and I joined a match normaly 40 secs too late after a mapchange. That was unpleasant, but since 33% of all other players had the same problem and the rounds didn't always start right away, it was not a "big" deal.

But ever since b262 (or 261) came out, i join in 3-8! minutes too late, missing all chances of participating in the early game. And I am the only one that has to load so long. I suspect the precaching stuff that got added in order to reduce microlag during playing. Well, it worked. I don't have microlag after all textures loaded. But joining a game 5 minutes too late is worse in my eyes.

Is UWE working on improving the loadtimes without adding microlag again? Or is my only solution to buy a new pc? Strange thing is, my E8400 @ 3GHz (Win Vista 32bit, 4 Gb Ram, HD 5850) is only using 4-67% of its power while loading. Most of the time it is on 25 or 4% and seldom jumps up to 67%. My HDD is making loud noises when it loads ns2 maps (only in ns2, but that stuff should be known). So, would a SSD speed up the process a lot (or only marginal) or is it more cpu dependant and can I prioritize ns2 to speed things up? I would prefer to buy nothing new at the moment and I think I read that SSDs are not that important for the map loading, that is why I am asking - Im not so sure about that and I have to figure out my options. Those long loading times are making me crazy...together with some Visual C++ crashes...

GhoulofGSG9

UWE (+ samusdroid) is working on it and improvements are confirmed for 263

A SSD or even better a Ramdisk works ways better than a HDD, still 8 min are alot.
You should try to defrag your hdd with a programm like defraggler: http://www.piriform.com/defraggler

Also decreasing the texture quality seems to help.

[AwE]Sentinel

Thanks for the fast reply! That sounds great.

My HDD doesnt't seemed to be defragged. AT least that is what Windows is telling me Maybe I should defrag it anyways. But I doubt that this will bring the load time back into "normal" dimensions. I am already running everything on low, so I don't have any room to manoeuvre

Is the cpu usage normal or should it be higher while loading?

GhoulofGSG9

A defrag always improves things (not only gameloads) abit so try it out.
Also defraggler (free + from the devs of ccleaner) allows you to just defrag the ns2 folder + %appdata% (for mods).
But over all a generell rule is if your hdd is more than 5% fragmented you should defrag it.

rkfg

I had long loading times once and later discovered a bunch of files in my home directory. There were tens of thousands of them. I accidently ran a script written by me (google art downloader), it was old and broken for a long time but it's got in an infinite loop and started producing empty files. Slowly but steadily. The problem was that NS2 traverses the directory tree from my home dir to .config/Natural Selection 2/cache and so on, those files slowed it to a crawl. So clearing your dirs along the NS2 data directory path is a good idea.

Adambean

You shouldn't really rely on the Windows built-in. All this does is defragment file contents with no specific ordering as to how these files then get laid out on the disk. You can get better performance from an alternative disk defragmenter, and usually the free / open-source ones are better than the commercially available ones.

Using a 3rd party tool like Defraggler, MyDefrag, or UltraDefrag (all 3 of those are free) will order files in a more logical order. For example: ordering by when they were last modified so less frequently modified files are placed on the fastest spinning part of the disk (outermost tracks) so they load quicker, or alphabetically so that file listing operations are faster. They all use the Windows API for moving file contents so they are all as reliable as the one built-in to Windows (no data lost should your computer suddenly lose power or blue screen).

My personal choice is MyDefrag as I like the kinds of defragging it does (I usually use its' weekly operation to run at a time of the week I'm usually at the pub), but otherwise it doesn't matter much which you choose. Someone has compiled a pretty in-depth benchmark if you want help deciding.

I also have two hard disks in RAID1 (using the Intel Rapid Storage controller) which can apparently increase read performance by getting the data from both disks rather than just one. I've never tested this to see if it really is faster than a single disk, and this isn't why I use a mirror array (I'm more concerned about one of the disks suddenly dying, which has happened to me twice before), but I do seem to get in game faster than most other players in public games -- particularly after a map change where only the new map needs to load.

[AwE]Sentinel

Thanks for the explanation. It is appreciated! I had ~11k shader files in my cache directory, the oldest was from 9.2012 ^_^ I deleted them and defragmented the ns2 folders with defraggler (took over two hours, so I decided against a whole defragmentation of the HDD with 15% fragmentation). But it is still taking 7-8 minutes in the worst cases. The first loading circle seems to be faster now, but that circle was never a real time eater. I will wait for 263, and if that doesn't improve things, I will defrag the whole HDD.

If I load a map and the server changes the map midway, it takes soo long to load and from time to time ns2 just hangs itself up in the process. Then there are visual C++ runtime errors (might be mod related) and crashes when I buy a lifeform/exo or go comm (might be out of memory bug when I load new effects/comm HUD etc.) that I think of leaving ns2 for good every time I play. The performance during the beta was bad, but I had at least never a crash or extremely longer loading times than other players. It is a shame that the game didn't get better with every new build for me. Others had more luck

Ghosthree3

I caved and bought an SSD. Honestly, I've been moaning about this issue (slow loads) for 27 builds now. It's not going to change. You might be able to improve it a bit...but it's still going to be awful.

DC_Darkling

Lets remember though that the bigger the game and more advanced the textures, the more traditional slow HDDs will be a problem. I would not be surprised if more and more games will have this issue in the future.

[AwE]Sentinel

I don't know if some mods aren't working or if the new algorythm is really that fast, but my loading time decreased roughly about 50%

But when I try to join a server I get a "could not establish a connection with the server" message a few times and I can only connect the 2nd or 3rd time trying. In addition to that, if I am on a server and the map changes, the marine male model is causing consistency errors and ns2 kinda stops working. I validated my files, everything is ok and I didn't change any models...no mods enabled. Never had that before.

Racer1

With an SSD, loading time should be in the 10s of seconds, not minutes.

IronHorse

@racer1
Not if consistency checking is being utilized..

Go ahead and run your own local server with consistency completely disabled, you will load in 10 seconds or less, just as you estimated.
important to note: latest build 263 introduces some optimizations with consistency checking