Upgrade Server?

[Psithief]

You people have to remember a lot of the lag is from the Ragnarok Online client itself. It's really badly coded. There's no buffering of sound effects, every time a sound is played it has to be read off the filesystem, and that's slow.

Try turning of sound effects, you'll probably notice an improvement.

Killing a mob with claymore trap is upwards of 100 individual hits. That's the same file read 100+ times, played 100+ times and a huge bundle of client-side lag. It disappears with sound effects off.

[Ellie]

I should introduce myself.

I'm Ellie.
From Australia.
The place way behind in the general standard of internet service.
On the other side of the world.

I rarely lag. =\
Except that day at Nidd. That sucked.

[Aaronock]

I actually have music turned off and even effects sometimes if it gets really bad, but haven't done sound effects, I'll try that one and tell you guys if I see improvement today. :D

[Psithief]

Prontera is really bad for client-side lag too.. all that loading of gears on merchants. Make sure your game files are uncompressed and defragmented. It would be best if they were on a solid state drive.

[Rankin]

You people have to remember a lot of the lag is from the Ragnarok Online client itself. It's really badly coded. There's no buffering of sound effects, every time a sound is played it has to be read off the filesystem, and that's slow.

Try turning of sound effects, you'll probably notice an improvement.

Killing a mob with claymore trap is upwards of 100 individual hits. That's the same file read 100+ times, played 100+ times and a huge bundle of client-side lag. It disappears with sound effects off.

if my computer lags with RO then i demand a refund from alienware. >.>

[TPC]

You people have to remember a lot of the lag is from the Ragnarok Online client itself. It's really badly coded. There's no buffering of sound effects, every time a sound is played it has to be read off the filesystem, and that's slow.

Unless you're using an operating system that was released over 10 years ago or are very low on ram the operating system should be buffering all recently accessed files on its own, since those are most likely to be accessed again. No buffering from the app needed. Its not 15 years ago anymore, this is seriously not an issue these days.

(Not sure if XP did the buffering, but anything newer definitely should. Other OSes like Linux and OSX has always had this buffering.)

But I agree that the RO client is badly written in some aspects. I believe that position lag is mostly a client issue for example, has nothing to do with network lag.

[Zzarkc-20]

I run a pretty solid DSL line, and I can run many other high end graphic intensive games without any lag. I also have an i7 processor, and a good hard drive. To be honest though, there is no way I would buy a SSD drive to play RO. Honestly, that would just be ridiculous.

What is odd, is that I am within the same time zone as the server, so I am closer than most other players, and therefore, the server has fewer routers to bridge through. Wouldn't it make more sense for one of the many routers to fail on the way to Australia as opposed to the one of a few routers within a few hundred miles of the server location?

I agree with Rankin, most people I know experience lag. I have been consistently getting position lagged half-way across the screen. It's not just myself, it's EVERYONE in my parties. Our lure dies in Thors, our priest can't res in nameless (because the dead body is actually around the corner), and high level parties nearly wipe from a huge lag spike.

Perhaps there might be a way to take a poll on the region in which you live and test connections with the server. Also, we could test lag spikes during certain times of day. For example: If people living within 200 miles of each other experience more lag than others on the server, than we could blame the routers. If there is nothing conclusive, we could blame it on an obsolete server. Also, we could run connection tests throughout the day and week. Perhaps the prime times of the day are sucking up too much bandwidth.

I'm just trying to find ways of ACTUALLY finding the problem before we fix something that's not broken.

[TPC]

What is odd, is that I am within the same time zone as the server, so I am closer than most other players, and therefore, the server has fewer routers to bridge through. Wouldn't it make more sense for one of the many routers to fail on the way to Australia as opposed to the one of a few routers within a few hundred miles of the server location?

More likely, but not necceserily. Could be a specific ISP (possibly a "backbone" ISP that rents out the their infrastructure to multiple customer ISPs) that has a problem with the routers going between U.S. and canada or something like that. Its pretty uncommon for this to happen, but not impossible, and could explain why I and some others living in Europe aren't lagging.

[Psithief]

You people have to remember a lot of the lag is from the Ragnarok Online client itself. It's really badly coded. There's no buffering of sound effects, every time a sound is played it has to be read off the filesystem, and that's slow.

Unless you're using an operating system that was released over 10 years ago or are very low on ram the operating system should be buffering all recently accessed files on its own, since those are most likely to be accessed again. No buffering from the app needed. Its not 15 years ago anymore, this is seriously not an issue these days.

(Not sure if XP did the buffering, but anything newer definitely should. Other OSes like Linux and OSX has always had this buffering.)

But I agree that the RO client is badly written in some aspects. I believe that position lag is mostly a client issue for example, has nothing to do with network lag.

All of RO's data is stored in one huge archive, and that's probably why my OS can't buffer it. Ideally I should go run around Prontera and record the read I/O events, but I don't have a baseline for comparison.

[TPC]

Yeah that might be a problem if you don't have a lot of ram. If you have enough ram for it you could always put the grf files on a ram disk and see if that makes a difference. Or extract the whole thing to the data folder since that would make many small individual files which could be easily cached. Or just extract the ones you think is a problem.

Still doesn't mean its necceserily a ro problem however if your results indicate that it gets better, could just mean your computer is slow at handling IO. I know mine is slower than I would like.