This caching is sheeite

[Job]

DAOC used to run lovely, my new machine flew along, with minimal load stutter.
New patch and it's turned to shite, goddam stuttering everywhere no matter what setting I use.

WHAT IN GODS NAME HAVE THEY DONE?

IF TAO DOESNT FIX THIS I'M OFF

 

[SFXman]

Amazingly enough the instant I went to the performance options and turned on armour skin precaching my computer crashed. I proceeded to restart and managed to play with the setting on for a good 3½ hours... I left the game and my computer crashed again at the character selection screen
Love the new "feature"...

 

[acei]

No caching = 300MB
Armour skins caching = 360MB
Full caching = 500MB

Make sure you have enough "free ram" to handle this? E.g. Windows XP caches itself as well for about 200MB+ sometimes.

 

[Arcee]

Works a treat for me. RvR has never been so smoother. I have 768mb RAM though.

 

[Hulbur]

hmmm i have 1gig of ram, and tbh i dont seem to notice any major improvement.

 

[Hargh]

750 here and i get stuttering with full precaching, going to turn it to medium tonight and see how that goes.

 

[SFXman]

No caching = 300MB
Armour skins caching = 360MB
Full caching = 500MB

Make sure you have enough "free ram" to handle this? E.g. Windows XP caches itself as well for about 200MB+ sometimes.

That would be ridiculous tbh.
That would mean that someone with 256mb of RAM would be running pretty much their entire Windows in the pagefile? If DAoC takes so much with no caching?
...I might be wrong here but why are you talking about RAM then?

I have 512mb of RAM, and my pagefile is set to a static 1 gig. The game works fine, quite well actually... I just don't want to have a significant chance of crashing when I enter or exit the character selection screen.

EDIT: Well actually with mIRC, Firebird (4 tabs), Winamp, eMule, firewall, MBM, and No-IP running the system cache is at a bit over 300mb

 

[Sharma]

Excellent, i think ive found out why my comp lags so much, the page file for the disk where i have it installed was set to no page file (GG me! ) and my C: drive was set to a whole 768MB big page file, now they have a 2GB page file on both disks.

 

[SFXman]

Err... you mean the partition or actual disk drive?
AFAIK, you need one page file only, and this is on the partition on which windows is installed.
As to having more then one hard drive, then I don't know how it should be done...

 

[acei]

That would be ridiculous tbh.
That would mean that someone with 256mb of RAM would be running pretty much their entire Windows in the pagefile? If DAoC takes so much with no caching?

Yup, it's why when i only had 256MB RAM and tried to enter Castle Sauvage i crashed instantly because their wasn't enough RAM... with 512MB RAM it fixed this problem... now that i have 768MB RAM it works fine, but with full-caching it takes up so much memory that i get a lag on my normal movements and it's hard to use MSN etc in windowed mode.

 

[SFXman]

Here is an experts stance on Virtual Memory (pagefile)... taken from Microsoft's website. EDIT: This is still not Microsoft's opinion on the matter...

* The less RAM you have, the more likely it is that Windows XP will use the page file, so the Windows XP default page file sizes make sense. If your computer has less than 512 MB of RAM, you should leave the page file sizes as is.
* The more RAM you have, the less likely it is that Windows XP will use the page file. Therefore, the default initial page file size is too large and the disk space reserved by Windows XP is wasted. On systems with 512 MB of RAM or more, you should set the initial page file size to half the RAM size, while leaving the maximum size at three times RAM, just in case.
* If disk space is at a premium and you can't move the page file to a drive with more free space, set the initial page file size to 2 MB (the minimum size supported by Windows XP). This should eventually result in the smallest possible page file, but you'll see a bit of a performance drop because Windows XP will often have to dynamically increase the size the page file as you work with your programs.
* You might think that setting the initial size and the maximum size to the same (relatively large—say, two or three times RAM) value would improve performance since it would mean that Windows XP would never resize the page file. In practice, however, it has been shown that this trick does not improve performance, and in some cases can actually decrease performance.

Taken from here: http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/expertzone/columns/mcfedries/03june16.asp

 

[Korax]

Press ctrl+alt+delete
Go on the performance tab
look at commit charge: peak
If the peak is over your total ram, dont enable it.
With 2 accounts up, mine peaks at 8-900, and I got 1gb ram.
Haven't thought about trying the cashe yet though... as I never really notice any lag :\

 

[SFXman]

Press ctrl+alt+delete
Go on the performance tab
look at commit charge: peak
If the peak is over your total ram, dont enable it.
With 2 accounts up, mine peaks at 8-900, and I got 1gb ram.
Haven't thought about trying the cashe yet though... as I never really notice any lag :\

Not sure if I understood correcty what you were trying to say... but if you were referring to disabling the virtual memory:
If you have a large amount of RAM (at least 1 GB), you might think that Windows XP would never need virtual memory, so that it would be okay to turn off the page file. This won't work, however, because Windows XP needs the page file anyway and some programs may crash if no virtual memory is present.
This is said over and over in numerous places.

 

[OldNick]

Not sure if I understood correcty what you were trying to say... but if you were referring to disabling the virtual memory:
If you have a large amount of RAM (at least 1 GB), you might think that Windows XP would never need virtual memory, so that it would be okay to turn off the page file. This won't work, however, because Windows XP needs the page file anyway and some programs may crash if no virtual memory is present.
This is said over and over in numerous places.

i read it that he means dont enable precaching in those circumstances and was not reffering to vitual memory

 

[Serbitar]

default (and recommended allegedly) page file size is twice the amount of physical memory ou have in your PC. i.e. you have 512MB RAM you have a 1024MB Page file.

 

[Siftwind]

Just a couple of things off the top of my head. Feel free to ingore. All related to XP and in some cases other OS's:
- There is a HD indexing option for faster searches. Removing the indexing speeds up disk performance.
- HD compression presents a significant performance impact.
- There is an option somewhere to make the OS non-pageable. If you have set this then the unused bits of OS won't be paged out to disk and will remain in (using) RAM.

I have 1gig of ram and haven't bothered playing with the caching.

Sift

 

[old.Whoodoo]

I get this juddering in onyl 2 zones, Iarnwood(Mid) and Aldey(Alb), done the reinstall thing but never played with the VM, so could this be part of my problem?

 

[Amuse]

i Have 512 MB DDR ram, 1,53 GHz, AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Geforce 4 Ti 4400

I run smother than ever with the Armour skins caching, both in RvR and PvE.
Havent tested the full caching yet, and not planing to

Runing MSN, Winamp, Anti-Virus, Firewall, and some other misc programs in the background.

 

[Korax]

i read it that he means dont enable precaching in those circumstances and was not reffering to vitual memory

Correct, should have been more clear.

 

[Job]

I's not just the load stuttering, my framerate has gone west, and it just seems to be constantly loading of the HD, no matter what setting I use, it's as if I've put my old gfx2 back in.

THIS IS REALLY REALLY REALLY CRAP!!!

 

[Aldrian]

Windows XP needing the pagefile is bullshit, ive had mine turn off (768 ram) for a while now, no problems and sometimes even faster than with pagefile, cause (at least mine) XP has a strange habit of using the pagefile instead of the ram, nearly 500 megs free and saying not enough pagefile

 

[Ormorof]

i got 3.0ghz p4 HT etc 1gb of ram and i get the stuttering all the time how can i fix this?

 

[Aldrian]

Btw job if its that bad I dont think its gotta do that much with the patch ;p
No problems here whatsoever

 

[Pin]

turned on full caching tonight. runs like an absolute dream.

might turn it back off again though, I get absolutely zero 'inc lag' now, even from 3fg :x

 

[Eynar]

If you have enough ram in your pc, you would want your pc to use the page file as little as possible, since it's a lot slower than ram...

 

[SFXman]

If you have enough ram in your pc, you would want your pc to use the page file as little as possible, since it's a lot slower than ram...

Again we have people stating the obvious.
Then again you PC will not use the pagefile until necessary.
For 100% (not 99.99999999%) stability I'd have it on regardless of how much RAM you have. The minimum is 2mb btw... set the min to 2mb and max to maybe 100-200mb... this way you use very little diskspace for it, and it is only there so that everything will work.
You people might have just not come across a situation where the pagefile has to be present.

 

[Jenkz]

not quite sure what all this talk about paging is trying to imply, but the whole point of the precaching was to aleviate(sp) the "lag" whilst loading up skins, by pre-loading the textures into main memory - instead of off the disk.

virtual memory, swap, "page file" or whatever you want to call it, is disk-based memory, and hence, suffers with slow disk access times (compared to main memory) so unless you have sufficient main memory (not page) dont even bother with the precache (mythic state this, that you need > 512meg)

if you turn these options on with <512meg (basically will result in the textures being located in page memory) you are basically not going to see much of a performance increase, as you will be loading the textures off disk just as you were before anyway....

 

[GReaper]

Windows XP needing the pagefile is bullshit, ive had mine turn off (768 ram) for a while now, no problems and sometimes even faster than with pagefile, cause (at least mine) XP has a strange habit of using the pagefile instead of the ram, nearly 500 megs free and saying not enough pagefile

I did have problems turning it off in Windows 98 I think.

Some games/apps refused to start, even though I had plenty of memory.

 

[Kreig]

might turn it back off again though, I get absolutely zero 'inc lag' now, even from 3fg :x

Mythic Approved "radar" then, pointless turning the pre-caching on if we lose inc lag

 

[Job]

Is this a joke, it has to be loaded sometime, you cant tell me the game loads every player in the zone on login.

I think this may be the problem, I've switched to no cache and things seem to have settled down.

You get loading stutters all the time cos the game is loading players who are well out of your clip range, it's not a full load stutter, it was just making the whole thing go slow as the BG's were really busy that night.
Before the patch you would get a big load at the ck and then all would be OK, now it's trying to load every goddam person running in and out of the extended load 'clip' range.

My drive is fast and so is my memory, so no cache is quite acceptable

BUT IT WAS BETTER BEFORE!!!!