Help Me Understand Long Load Times

[mattlach]

Alright,

Her is an issue that bugs the hell out of me. It seems to take me MUCH longer to join a server than anyone else, despite me configuring my machine for maximum performance.

On large 64 player servers, I usually wind up getting the team selection screen when ~25 people have already joined the server on each side.

Unless a non-rifleman spot opens up in game and I switch to it, I am always playing the rifleman class (which is annoying as it is almost leveled to Veteran, and my other classes aren't leveled much at all).

I also usually miss out on the early freebie caps that everyone else gets (Like Gullies while playing Germans on Spartanovka) as they are either already captured when I finally connect, or I connect while they are being captured and I can't get there on time.

I have tried everything to improve the situation with no success.

• I run the game off of a lightning fast latest generation sandforce SSD with 550MB/s sustained read speeds and virtually nonexistent seek times. DMA mode is enabled.
• My GPU is a Radeon 7970@1150Mhz running in PCIe 3.0 16x, which should be plenty fast to transfer game data and textures to the video ram.
• My CPU is a Core i7-3930K, six core Sandy Bridge-E chip running at 4.6Ghz with HT enabled for 12 logical cores.
• I have 16GB of DDR3 RAM in Quad Channel mode at 1600Mhz for unparalleled RAM bandwidth
• I upgraded my broadband connection to 30Mbit down, 25Mbit up and even Switched out my router twice (ISP supplied router -> High end Netgear N600 (WNDR3700) Router -> Dedicated high end pfSense router/firewall box) without any success. I ping anywhere from 10-15ms (console, 50-60ms in game) to the servers I play on.
• Since getting the game I even tried reinstalling Windows 7 Pro just incase I had a messed up OS causing the problem, with no success.

I can't think of anything else I can change or improve to make this problem go away.

When loading a map, I spend what seems like forever staring that the loading slideshow (with the little running white soldier on the bottom right hand side). During this time there is no GPU activity (GPU load is near 0), no CPU activity (CPU activity is near 0) and no disk activity. Then all of a sudden after waiting what seems like forever, the loading process seems to kick in for real, there is some disk activity, and then the game loads.

I've tried doing some of the .INI tweaks that were going around, including the one where you initialize shaders on demand, rather than pre-initializing them. This seems to have barely impacted the load time, but just resulted in some in-game jerkiness for me early in each map.

I don't think it's network related, as it seems to do the same thing when loading single player games as multiplayer games.

I'd appreciate any help I can get to solve this issue. I just don't seem to understand why I - with all the upgrades and attempts to fix this problem - have it, and so many others don't.

Any suggestions are welcome. I am just so tired of the KAR98 and Mosin-Nagant.

[r5cya]

you could try this if you haven't done so. i think my ini is still configured this way.
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.co...ong+load+times

p.s. i bought a cheaper ssd hoping to cure the problem as well. no luck.

[mattlach]

Originally Posted by r5cya

you could try this if you haven't done so. i think my ini is still configured this way.
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.co...ong+load+times

p.s. i bought a cheaper ssd hoping to cure the problem as well. no luck.

Yeah, I did this. it may have shaved a couple of seconds off, but not enough to make a real difference. Instead it blessed me with significant freezes and stuttering for the first few minutes of every map. (probably as it's initializing those shaders on demand )

[r5cya]

damn. i was hoping that would help you. sorry.
it makes no sense that a computer as good as yours has slow load times. are you sure your memory is ok? only thing i can think of is a bad memory chip. hope you sort it out!

[mattlach]

Originally Posted by r5cya

damn. i was hoping that would help you. sorry.
it makes no sense that a computer as good as yours has slow load times. are you sure your memory is ok? only thing i can think of is a bad memory chip. hope you sort it out!

Well, it passes memtest86, so I suppose the RAM is ok.

Thanks for the suggestion though! I'll try anything at this point.

[oldslowguy]

The devs drop in here from time to time, I'd keep rechecking your thread, bump as need be. (BTW, nice rig!, where do you live, exactly?, have any guard dogs? )

[Freezy]

At first I wanted to suggest that you get a good network-card, but then looked up your board and saw it already has an Intel controller onboard, so I'm out of ideas.

Judging from your posts in the DirectX 11 thread I think you know your stuff when it comes to PCs/hardware, so I think a falsely set up system is out of the question.

[Tummel]

Might be a long shot, according to collected experience over the years, I've learned not to trust network cables - at least not twisted-pair variant. Just a single step may ruin a patch cable, if you're unlucky.

Check your pfsense interfaces for input/output errors, if you have errors in either WAN/LAN side, suspect cabling. Especially if you have reused some old cables, recommend ditching at least them.

[mattlach]

Originally Posted by Freezy

At first I wanted to suggest that you get a good network-card, but then looked up your board and saw it already has an Intel controller onboard, so I'm out of ideas.

Judging from your posts in the DirectX 11 thread I think you know your stuff when it comes to PCs/hardware, so I think a falsely set up system is out of the question.

You never know. Nobody's perfect. I could have overlooked something. I't usually the dumbest things that escape you.

Originally Posted by oldslowguy

The devs drop in here from time to time, I'd keep rechecking your thread, bump as need be. (BTW, nice rig!, where do you live, exactly?, have any guard dogs? )

haha Thanks! I'll keep checking back in.

Originally Posted by Tummel

Might be a long shot, according to collected experience over the years, I've learned not to trust network cables - at least not twisted-pair variant. Just a single step may ruin a patch cable, if you're unlucky.

Check your pfsense interfaces for input/output errors, if you have errors in either WAN/LAN side, suspect cabling. Especially if you have reused some old cables, recommend ditching at least them.

Good advice. I'll check this.

Seems odd that bad cables would affect only RO2 though. That, and single player games take similarly long time to load.

[Freezy]

I don't think it's the wire, my network cable goes through 2 doors and is pretty battered from the opening and closing the doors, but RO2 loads normally.

[Freezy]

Some people with a X79 seem to have problems with the 4k read/write-speed of their ssds when using the onboard Intel sata-controller (not with the ASMedia). Deactivating the "Windows write-cache buffer flushing" for the drive seems to fix this for now.

here's an example in the official Corsair-forums:
http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?p=564282

Maybe RO2 has a high amount of 4k writes while loading, I don't now, I just saw a thread about this on a forum I visited and thought you might give it a try.

[mattlach]

Thanks for all your suggestions guys.

I figured out my problem, and its pretty silly.

I maintain an SSD only system (no mechanical drives) so that my operating system and programs load quickly. Since SSD space is expensive I also have a storage server in the basement for all my files.

I had moved my "My Documents" (Which also contains "My Games") to this remote storage box (via SAMBA).

My storage server is currently a Linux VM running on an ESXi box which also does a few other things for me. Due to an incompatibility between ESXi and my storage array, it is limited to only about 3MB/s transfer rates (saving up for a server upgrade to fix this in the future).

Apparently RO2 does a lot of disk writes and reads from the "My Games" folder during map loads (which is kind of odd), so on my machine all these were being re-routed to my crippled slow storage server, slowing down the load times of the game.

Now that I have moved my "my games" folder back to my local SSD, load times are excellent, just where I'd expect them to be from an SSD.