Zoning Delays

[SagoS]

The other thread "Zoning Speed" brought this to my attention. I have researched the entire zoning thing in everquest for awhile and from what I've found out most people zone in 30-50 seconds when all models are turned on. Now, on the other hand with models turned off, the general speed of zoning is around 10-20 seconds for most people, and those with high end computers can push the limits and zone in 3-5 seconds. One thing I've been questioning is the Cobalt Scar to SkyShrine zone in. from what i've found out most people generally zone faster into there and I myself have experienced 3 "no-load-time" zones where as soon as you click the zone in you're in skyshrine without any delay. This, well, truly confuses me considering the structure of the zone and how long it should take in relation to other zones (Like the arena, purely simple zone without any mobs except a few event triggers, yet zone in time is worse than wakening lands even though the zone is the smallest one in the game other than cshome)

Any idea's what SoE has done to possibly cause this? My guess is that its simply a lonely zone running on a server with different outside access bandwidth amounts, but this would truly be a guess.

[high_jeeves]

My guess is that 90% of your zonetime is related to two things:

1) Loading/setup of textures and models (although, models are generally very small and inexpensive to load). Loading textures and pushing (some of) them to VRAM can be an EXTREMELY expensive operation in any graphics application. Also consider that they probably do things like mip-map generation (they may save mipmaps, not sure..) and other such 3D graphics operations at this point.

2) Zone data download time. This one is more of a minimum... it doesnt take very long at all to do this, but if your machine is fast enough, this will probably end up as your limiting factor.

As to why some zones are slowing/faster than others... i think the textures play a big part (And remember, more possible MOB models in any give zone means number more textures), and I also think that general internet reliability will play a factor. If your zone time is always 3-5 seconds, but every once in a while, one takes 10.. that is probably because your packets didnt make it cleanly and had to be resent, or some other similar network issue.

Just my thoughts...

My load times are generally < 5 seconds on my main machine, and < 15 seconds on my laptop... which to me is plenty fast, considering that i first started playing EQ on a 550Mhz machine when load times were more like 60-90 seconds.

--Jeeves

[Jonn]

Part of the delay frequently is when you change servers. Each "world" is actually made up of 20-30 physical machines (watch your UDP packets while connected, when you zone, you frequently bounce to a different remote host, always the same host for the same zone). So when you go from, say, LOIO to FV, you're bouncing between two machines, and the new machine puts you in a queue to essentially log in to that particular machine, adding to the delay, depending on the load of your target machine.

In-game geography has nothing to do with what boxes they host different zones on, that is decided by what they have to do to balance the load across all machines (which is why you some times see big server-side lag hiccups [eg, mob charging at you, packet loss for 5-6 sec, mob warps back to where it was when the packet loss started] in zones that you are the only one in, and there are very few mobs in [Halas, Arena], if something big is happening in a different zone, this can cause that scenario).

So if you happen to zone from a worldserver to the same one, you can zone very quickly as the whole re-login process gets skipped.

This is also why in-zone tells are far less latent than cross-zone tells, cross-zone tells have to bounce off the central worldserver that coordinates the rest of the boxen, and it of course has a nice fat queue of tells at any given time to deliver (almost all /gu, and /tells; though /chat is done on its own server, it's even possible for the chat server to go down and have everyone lose their ability to /chat for a while)

That explain it? :-)