NWN2 :: HELP US Reduce Server Lag and Crashes

Dungeon Master (NWN 2) Gender: Age: 27 Joined: 10 Apr 2007

This thread is intended to consolidate all information about lag and crashes as it relates to NWN2 / DEX2 .

I CAN NOT EMPHASIZE STRONGLY ENOUGH HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS TO MAINTAINING OPTIMUM SERVER PERFORMANCE... EVERYONE, PLEASE READ AND APPLY MOST OR ALL OF THE COUNTERMEASURES WITHIN THIS TOP THREAD. I say "everyone", because it is well documented that individual player PC performance can affect server performance in NWN2. If you do read and apply the countermeasures listed here, but still do not see better server performance, that doesn't mean that this stuff doesn't work. It does mean that you have done your part and eliminated some potential contributors to cumulative lag. So please donate some of your time to try these things, as I have donated a lot of my time to research these issues and summarize the most highly recognized fixes.
THANKS Smile

I will keep this top post up to date with anything that we currently know or highly suspect of being contributors to lag and crashes, and any feasible countermeasures clients can try on their end to help us out. As well as keep everyone up to date on our latest activities in this battle against lag and crashes.

Players please contribute any insights within this thread as well, though please be accurate. Any verified testing is greatly appreciated, and I am willing to attempt to develop and support any testing strategies players may have in mind.
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Files in your Override Folders
http://www.dungeoneternal.com/phpBB2/ftopic6334.php
please check both of your override folders and insure they are empty. Please DO NOT add anything else within the override folders.
ui haks and soundset.2da may contribute a minimal amount of server lag, so if you plan to use any of these, please inform the development staff (either within this thread or via PM) as soon as possible.

Player PC Enhancements
Player transition crashes are also suspected of causing some server-wide crashes. This thread from Bioware notes several things players can do within their own systems in order to minimize transition crashing:
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=568358&forum=118&sp=0
I'd suggest trying most or all of the recommendations within the initial post (no need to read the entire thread).
I perform regular system maintenance about once a month by following a routine documented within Tweakguides, which gave me a tremendous improvement the first time I applied it:
http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html
This guide includes so much very valuable information about how to properly set up and maintain your PC. It provides a rountine manintenance schedule, dow to the details of which free, downloadable software tools are the most effective, and detailed instuctions of how to get the most out of each. I stronlgy recommend this guide. Though reading through and applying the whole thing would be a significant amount of time, the dividends it pays back (in the form of time saved from lag and crashes) is exponentially greater.
I also had some improvements when following NWN2 Gamers Tweakguide by the same author:
http://www.tweakguides.com/NWN2_1.html

Use of WASD Keys to move your character
Sounds ridiculous, but this one is still being strongly suspected by Obsidian to be a significant contributor of PW lag. Re-mapping these keys probably has no affect either. At least their attention is on it and they realize how valuable these keys can be in combat situations, so they should be giving it a lot of attention right now. In the meantime, perhaps we could all try not to sue our WASD keys too much.

After updating to MotB, create a new NWN2 folder in MyDocuments (trash the old one)
Rob McGinnis recommends "renaming your Neverwinter Nights 2 folder" (the one in MyDocuments location)... just rename it to anything else, then the next time you run the game, a fresh one will be created:
Locate your MyDocs/Neverwinter Nights 2 folder:
Rename it to old_Neverwinter Nights 2 (or anything other than Neverwinter Nights 2)
Don't delete it...
Now start up NWN2 again, it will create a new MyDocs/Neverwinter Nights 2 folder

From Old_Neverwinter Nights 2/PWC ,
Copy the DEX#1015.pwc
and paste it into Neverwinter Nights 2/PWC

From Old_Neverwinter Nights 2/hak ,
Copy DEX.hak
and paste it into Neverwinter Nights 2/PWC

You may have several other old UI haks or other stuff, but don't copy paste those over yet, just try out DEX2 without them and see if it improves your performance any.

Purge out Old UI haks
Some of these will definately cause crashes.
There are so many of these that you may have forgotten using some, and the 1.10.1116 /MOTB updates affected a lot of related files.
Check both of your NWN2/UI directorys for old ui haks...
If you might have installed ui haks in your game install directory rather than your MyDocuments directory and are not sure which files belong there and which don't, then maybe a re-install is your best option.

If anyone plans on using any UI haks, please either list them within this thread or PM me and maybe I can devise some way to test them to verify whther or not they may be contributing to lag.

Limit Dual Core Chips to a Single Core while playing NWN2

Many players have reported that this helped solve their problems very significantly. Especially sped up load times. To do this,
start nwn2
hit Ctrl-Alt-Del (to bring up the task manager)
right click on the nwn2 process
and set the affinity of ONE of your cpu's to zero

Corrupted Character BIC Files
If you ever crash while logging in one particular character, you may have just crashed the server as well. Please access your Player Statistics site:
http://www.dungeoneternal.com/phpBB2/ftopic6224.php
Then go to the "MyVault" Link to view character bic file sizes. Inform us if there are any files > 1 MB (we might be developing something to do this automatically in the future, but for now, your help is appreciated)

THANKS
Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience to everyone who does these things and encourages other DEX2 players to do so, too (keep in mind a lot of them don't visit these forums often so may not be aware of these things unless we can tell them in game).

Dungeon Master (NWN 2) Gender: Age: 27 Joined: 10 Apr 2007

Mostly Harmless Gender: Age: 30 Joined: 04 Aug 2007

Ok, just now i adjusted all my graphic setting to almost the lowest, no shadow, no light, no grass, everything no. ( a big waste to my 8600GTS graphic card Sad

)

I also added some spell graphic reduce hak to my override. The result is 100 times better than my original setting. I have almost zero lag (exclude my 300+ ping)

Actually i want to ask, did u do something to the server? or is it all because i reduce my settings?

Dungeon Master (NWN 2) Gender: Age: 27 Joined: 10 Apr 2007

I did nothing with the server, and don't think Seed did anything differnt today. I think it was just a period of time there where none of our players had anything in override, and the other conditions above were met.

I am not sure whether / how individual player PC performance can / does affect server performance, though some in the community suspect it does, so perhaps you making some of those changes in your system helped the server as well.

Regarding your settings, you can play with them, turn some of them back up to see which give you the most graphical improvement for the least performance hit. I keep all of mine at a minimum, except for I think some of graphic settings from "none" I switched to "point" (but not "linear") and get a dramatic improvement in terrain resolution for no noticable performance loss. That NWN2 tweak guide has a lot of screenshots to show actual affects so it may be worth reading though the whole thing.

I too just had an amazing 100 minutes of excellent server time, even while logged in as a DM, and doing a lot of DM functions all the while, with form 10 to 15 players on at all times. I'd asked a few times and seems everyeone else was getting good performance at the time too.

I was testing that same override hak "less obtrusive spell buffs", also had a soundset.2da and some UI haks in override; These all seem ok.

Perhaps the best thing we can do for now is just try to keep all other players who don't necessarily log in here and check regularly of what we're finding can help.

Thanks

Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 11:25 am

You don't have to get everything to lowest. Turning shadows off and the water option were enough for me, and i have a geforce 7800gt. Also i play in 1024x768, for some reason this works better than any other resolution.

Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 11:30 am

Can you run an entry area and manually check people for items in the override folders....just an idea

Dungeon Master (NWN 2) Gender: Age: 27 Joined: 10 Apr 2007

Quote:

Can you run an entry area and manually check people for items in the override folders

Maybe, though I wouldn't knw how to set up something like that.

I had asked the World Gate owner for some functionality that could check and remove items from players' overrides, though this could introduce other potential issues, so was refused.

At least one other server (one of the most popular with stable service) is looking into ways to control players' override folders and has stated they'd share whatever solutions they come up with.

Dungeon Master (NWN 2) Gender: Age: 27 Joined: 10 Apr 2007

Can we sticky this please?

I think its been helping. I spent a lot of time on server today mainly greeting newer players as well as shouting reference to this post whenever lag seemed to creep up. Even found a couple of relatively new players who found stuff in override we removed and performance seemed to improve immediately.

Average Joined: 04 Apr 2007

I know from experience that when there is lag spike there is over 50% of chance you crash during an area transition.

And i also know that if a player crash during a transition that can lock the whole server too, if that player manage to close his game quick enough that can unfreeze the server. But most peoples when they crash during transition they wait too much and the server goes down.

When you crash during area transition you try ALT+TAB if nothing work you gotta press reset.

"harmless" maggot Gender: Joined: 18 Feb 2006

this may/may not be the right place but i crash when i use my bind stone.....i forget where i was bond and i cant use it to find out becuz b4 it even gets to the loading screen it crashes it.

any1 else have this prob that you know of?

Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2007 2:39 pm

If u log on dex stats website u can access ur vault there and i think u can see where r ur chars bound.

Dungeon Master (NWN 2) Gender: Age: 27 Joined: 10 Apr 2007

Quote:

...I know from experience that when there is lag spike there is over 50% of chance you crash during an area transition.

And i also know that if a player crash during a transition that can lock the whole server too...

Yeah its true that individual client PC crashes can in some cases cause server crashes, according to current discussions at Bioware forums. So when players try any/all f the things listed within the top post of this thread, it not only will likely help reduce their system crashes, but the whole server as well.

Quote:

this may/may not be the right place but i crash when i use my bind stone.....i forget where i was bond and i cant use it to find out becuz b4 it even gets to the loading screen it crashes it.

This thread is the right place for reporting any such things (potential causes or symptoms related to lag or crashes).

Just wanted to note that checking override folders is one thing that we can do, but each of the other things (system maintenance, etc, even just a simple defrag can make a huge difference) in the top thread may help out just as significantly, so don't stop with just checking override folders.

Also within the linked thread, one of their suggestions is that using a particular hak in override ("Less Obstrusive Spell Buffs"). This sounds like a contradiction as we've asked to remove things from override, but this particular hak does seem to help, as some players have fedback to us (perhaps particularly helpful for those who may have slightly older or lower end graphics cards?).

I spent a lot of time monitoring the lag situation, in and out of game over the past day, a lot of time in game greeting new players, showing them around a bit, and in every case drawing their attention to this thread. And have noticed a lot of other players doing the same. It seems to have had some significant affect and I want to thank everyone who's spreading the word.

Stranger Joined: 11 Sep 2007

I am always having bad lag and here is a trace route from myself (TENNESSEE) to the server (PHILLY).
As you can see the internet backbone takes me to who-the-hell-knows where and back, nowhere a strait line to the server...no wonder I LAG. My only question is, how can my Internet Service Provider help this?

Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2007 11:11 pm

I'm not sure Jackass, but it looks like Comcast is the problem here. You make 14 hops from TN through TX to PA and then Comcast sends you on another 16 hops around the Philadelphia area. You're timing out in Willow Grove which is only a hop away from my home. I'm not sure if the 130+ ms per hop is a lot or not, but it seems excessive that you'd go through so many in the PA zone alone.

Stranger Joined: 11 Sep 2007

LOL, ignore the Jackass part...hehe Anyways, I can't be for sure, but I have a good idea what may be the problem...

1) We have DSL..which in my experience is slower but more consistent than Cable, but Cable offers generally overall and peak speeds/bandwidths. I have speed tested my connection and its...noticeably slower than my old comcast cable connection.

2) I do not have access to the router, and can not open ports that may or may not speed up the flow of information to the destination(game server). I'll have to ask my brother for the router password.

3) Double Firewalls and Anti-Virus when all turned on. ZoneAlarm (Software Firewall), Router (Hardware Firewall), and Kasper Sky Anti-Virus. Now this I usually turn off the anti-virus when playing OR tweak it to a speed setting that minimizes performance impact.

Could any of these steps from number THREE be changed now that may or something that I can help in the immediate future. Obviously, One will take time to change, two will take a day or two..