Jerky mouse movement/seq performance issues

[Kuonji]

I have a k6-2 550 with 196 megs of pc-133 ram, diamond viper card running completely fresh install of redhat 7.2 and cvs version of seq and I notice that while running seq sometimes I'll get very jerky mouse movements across all of xwindows, and extremely slow response times when clicking on things in seq itself. Then after a while it'll go away....and then be back again. Turning on or off 'Fast computer' doesn't seem to be making any signifigant difference either way. Changing the frame rate doesn't seem to help much either.

Any suggestions? :confused:

[Yendor]

have you taken the framerate all the way down to 1?

[Kuonji]

I don't believe the framerate is an issue...this is an intermittant problem. I'm in OT right now, full map view, 10 fps...and I'm getting no mouse or client lag at *all*.....but i can be in splitpaw, zoomed in, with like 3 things on the map and it can be jerky.

It's random..

[Cryonic]

Have you verified that it is SEQ causing the lag and not some external program eating up resources that SEQ needs?

top is your friend.

[Kuonji]

As I said. This is a completely fresh install of Redhat 7.2. If there are any programs running in the background eating up resources, they are there because RH 7.2 wants them there I suppose.

[Cryonic]

In other words, nope. Makes it kinda hard to troubleshoot the issue on what little information you have given.

Customer "My computer doesn't work, make it work"
Tech "What doesn't work?"
Customer "My computer doesn't work, make it work"

top is your friend.

[Kuonji]

ARGH! wtf man =p


Clean install of RH 7.2. Gnome environment. NO background programs running.


I ran the cpu usage applet that showed cpu usage over time.


Sometimes (Such as in OT I've noticed), I can run at 10fps with 2 map windows open, zoomed fully in or fully out, and I'll have smooth system performance, the cpu usage hanging around 60%.


Then, I'll camp and bring in a character in a different zone, qeynos north or paw. The mouse will be jerky, response time slow, and CPU usage at a constant 100%, no matter how many maps are open, no matter what the framerate...

What exactly do you want to know that I haven't told you? My setup isn't more complex than what I've already described.

[fee]

Clean install of RH 7.2. Gnome environment.


hmm, i think you might have discovered the problem...

fee

[Kuonji]

So I should *not* have chosen Gnome Workstation?

Isn't that the default?

Isn't that what most people choose?

[fryfrog]

i would suggest dropping down from 10fps to about 2-3fps. unlike most first person shooters, having a fast frame rate on your map isn't going to do you a ton of good. most of these mobs (including yourself) don't really move that fast to start off with. it will save you a lot of cpu time. i personally play at 2fps and can't say that i miss those 8 frames per second.

i believe that a large number of people prefer kde over gnome, but in redhat and mandrake (as long as you have installed both kde and gnome) it is fairly easy to switch back and forth. try them both out.

personally, i found that mandrake seems to just perform better than redhat. i personally think its due to the optimization for pentium+, but i spose it could be something else.

[Kuonji]

I've tried down to 1fps, the CPU usage does *not* drop down from 100%.

I'm assuming by the responses that this isn't a common issue, so I won't expect a common fix. I suppose I will mess around and perhaps upgrade my system with a faster processor. The thing that upsets me the most is the randomness of this problem. Sometimes it will be fantastic, other times it's jerky, slow, and processor intensive. I see no common denominator between those times.

[high_jeeves]

Run "top" from the command line, and look at what is taking all of your processor time. On some systems, Xapm (power management) appears to take 100% of processor time when it really isnt. Watch top when ShowEQ slows down so we can see if it is really a ShowEQ problem or something else.

"NO background programs running"

Wow, how are you running ShowEQ without atleast running X and about 15 other standard services? Thats impressive...

[Kuonji]

None as in none initiated manually by me.

I will look at top and see what it has to say...hopefully it'll help..

Thanks for the advice =)

[Kuonji]

Update:

I logged on a newbie in qeynos with seq running. I started getting the jerky mouse movement so I ran top in a terminal window on top of my seq window.

Seq itself is using 11 percent of the cpu, X itself is using around 90 percent of the cpu.

If I switch to another workspace where seq isn't being displayed and look at top again, seq is using 1 percent of the cpu and X is using under 1 percent of the cpu. Mouse movements return to normal.

Nothing else is using anything over 1 percent of cpu or memory usage... :confused: :confused:

[high_jeeves]

What window manager are you using? Some people on these boards have mentioned issues with certain window managers...

(ie, KDE, Gnome, or some other WM?)

-jeeves

[fee]

When reporting problems of this nature, it would helpful to provide the following information.

what xserver you are running, including version and driver module

what environment, gnome, KDE etc

what window manager. window maker, sawfish, pwm, etc

Please post the zone you are in with the approximate number of spawns at the time you notice the performance problem.

Also note the %cpu being used by showeq and the Xserver.


If you are unable to answer these questions then you are not helping. Simply saying " i am running RH 7.2 or Mandrak 23.2", means absolutly nothing.

fee

[S_B_R]

With ShowEQ running and without launching EQ, X is using about 51.2% of the CPU with all the rest of the processes taking about 1.2%. If I switch to a different workspace X drops to 0.3%. This is on a Celeron 400MHz.

XFree86 Version 4.1.0 using the Voodoo3 Generic module
Gnome desktop
SawFish WM

No Matter what zone I'm in, CPU utilization never exceeds about 95% but it never goes below 50.9%, even when I'm not in the game as stated above.

I'm thinking that I'll try switching to KDE soon as I get a chance and seeing if the same thing occurs there...

[Kuonji]

Originally posted by fee
When reporting problems of this nature, it would helpful to provide the following information.

what xserver you are running, including version and driver module

what environment, gnome, KDE etc

what window manager. window maker, sawfish, pwm, etc

Please post the zone you are in with the approximate number of spawns at the time you notice the performance problem.

Also note the %cpu being used by showeq and the Xserver.


If you are unable to answer these questions then you are not helping. Simply saying " i am running RH 7.2 or Mandrak 23.2", means absolutly nothing.

fee

How can I find out what xserver I am running? as well as the version and driver module?

I'm using Gnome environment and sawfish window manager.

Zone this happens in is random. More often than not, however, is Sebilis that it bogs down the cpu, but OT usually does not bog it down. OT I believe has more spawns. Qeynos north can bog it down, or it can not, it's random.

When the machine is being heavily taxed, x is using around 90 percent of the cpu, and seq is using most of the remaining 10 percent.

When it's running 'normally', x is using 25-55% of the cpu and seq is using around 5-10% with the rest free.

Note, again...this is an AMD k6-550. Is there perhaps a compatibility issue between what I'm running and this flavor of AMD processor that anyone knows of?

I've also run seq under TWM environment to test, and it did not seem to help performance, same 90%/10% as listed above randomly.

Edit: Update, I logged off of eq for a few hours, came back on into south karana, processor usage totaled under 50% (ie: works as it should). Camped, brought a character in seb in, again 50% usage max, tried a couple other zones, everything is fine....
It's this randomness that's bugging me...

[high_jeeves]

I beleive that I read in another thread here that some people were having problems with the Gnome environment. Might want to log into KDE for a session to see if the problem doesnt go away. X using 25-55% of your CPU seems very excessive to me, on my machine X rarely goes about 15% of one processor, and it is a Dual PPro 200. Are you doing font AA and transparent windows and such? If so, turning down some font candy will certainly help.

--Jeeves

[Kuonji]

Here are some threads with people who seem to be having the exact same issue:


http://seq.sourceforge.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=306


http://seq.sourceforge.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=358



This is precisely what is happening to me.

[Cryonic]

try using a different environment than Gnome or KDE. I'm using icewm on a P150 laptop. Starting up X and SEQ I get:

40 processes: 39 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 1.1% user, 1.1% system, 0.0% nice, 97.6% idle
Mem: 78760K av, 75048K used, 3712K free, 0K shrd, 15620K buff
Swap: 168608K av, 1096K used, 167512K free 21812K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
2417 user 19 0 1032 1032 832 R 1.3 1.3 0:01 top
701 root 12 0 1800 1588 1384 S 0.5 2.0 0:18 sshd2
1 root 8 0 516 488 448 S 0.0 0.6 0:04 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd
3 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kapm-idled
4 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:01 kswapd
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 bdflush
7 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kupdated
8 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:12 kjournald
411 root 9 0 616 616 516 S 0.0 0.7 0:00 syslogd
417 root 9 0 1064 1060 448 S 0.0 1.3 0:02 klogd
529 root 8 0 528 524 468 S 0.0 0.6 0:00 apmd
555 root 8 0 672 668 512 S 0.0 0.8 0:00 cardmgr
591 root 9 0 468 456 404 S 0.0 0.5 0:00 gpm
610 root 9 0 1164 924 840 S 0.0 1.1 0:00 sshd2

As you can see without EQ up, neither X nor SEQ even make it onto the top status. This suggests that Gnome is your culprit because X shouldn't be eating up so much of your resources.