Performance changes as guilds log on/off in cyro. What's going on?

TineaCruris

I've determined that it is far too frustrating to try and play in prime time cyrodiil lag, so I don't even try anymore most of the time. So instead I've been playing very early in the morning US time. At this time cyrodiil is populated mostly by Japanese and Australian guilds. For people playing in Japan and Australia, it's getting very late their time, and they tend to log off en masse.

We can literally see performance increases and decreases in cyrodiil as these guilds log on and log off. How can this be a thing? And what is going on? To me, this is a symptom of something not right with the servers and not so much the game development. To me, it seems more like a hardware problem than a software problem.

Is what is going on with all these performance issues something that can be fixed by the devs at all? Or is the problem more with the bean counters at Zenimax not footing the bill for enough or high quality enough servers to support the player base? How else could we explain such drastic differences in performance under load?

If you play between about 8am-11am eastern time you can see for yourself. As the Japanese and Australian guilds log off, performance gets better. As the US guilds and players log on and population approaches locked, performance lags back down again.

TineaCruris

First thing logging into cyrodiil this morning, ride up to a keep- disconnect.

Try to log back on, error.

Try to log back on, error.

Massive lag spikes at low population hours just because it's the weekend.

How does performance vary so radically by the time of day or the day of the week?

Pinja

TineaCruris wrote: »

First thing logging into cyrodiil this morning, ride up to a keep- disconnect.

Try to log back on, error.

Try to log back on, error.

Massive lag spikes at low population hours just because it's the weekend.

How does performance vary so radically by the time of day or the day of the week?

I think this is explained by the storage-optimization/cold-storage theory. If I interpreted this right Data caching in update 27 may help alleviate it, depending on how big the cache is or how well it rewrites qued & requed data.
An overloaded server may drop you but I don't think the Cyrodiil server was... What this may mean is if there is a timeout between the database and a server, it times out the player. Where the database receives a request to update the player data times out on it, then sends a time out error to the client that takes you back to the log in (The same time out script as if you were attempting to login for the first time). Unless it updates player data from the client which I don't think it does.

If I have this data cache thing figured out, it'll store & replace requests to the database, queuing them in a controlled order so the database doesn't get overloaded by every single servers request to update player data.

One quick fix would be to have the database not time out players that are already logged in for say 10mins (possibility this brings back infinite load screens if the data base is really stuck processing the request). To even have them not time out at all may also be a consideration.

What type of error are you getting, is the connection time out or the already logged in?

Nanfoodle

People keep using the word development, I don't think it means what people think it means. Anyone got a peanut?