PSA : A simple trick to help reduce lag

brandonv516 · December 2018

So I could theoretically type in asdf and it would constantly refresh that?

Provision · December 2018

It's not because you reduce or increase your ms that is a server side origin/impact.

Your esoui interface can freeze, if you have lot of processing. It's why you have an addon like that : LibAsync which try to get a better framerate.

eso_lags · December 2018

Swomp23 wrote: »

So, since I started playing pvp about 1 month ago, I've never been able to rush the flags in a defended keep because the game would aways drop to atrocious fps, crash, and send me back to Xbox's home screen. I also had many crashes in medium-sized fights outside of keeps. I have a basic Xbox 1, with the game installed directly on it's hard drive, so it might be the most fragile setup, but this situation has pulled me back from Cyro to a point where I was only playing BGs.

All this until last night, where I could'nt queue in any BG or dungeon, because the damn group finder was bugged again. So I decided to hop in Cyro, to begin to farm my tier 1 reward for the month. Someone in my random group told us that a great way to reduce lag was to type your own name in the search tab of the guild roster. It reduced cpu usage or wathever. I thought this was a load of bs, but I tried it anyway, since it doesn't cost much. Well, believe it or not, after that I was able to rush the flags in 3 heavily defended keeps without too many lag spikes and no crash at all. Well, not too many lag spikes for this game anyway...

I know it's just 1 session and it doesn't mean much, but all 3 pops were locked and there was a lot of people, so it's pretty encouraging for now. Try it yourself and tell us if it helps!

Thanks for this info, this is awesome and its awesome of you to share it. Ive tried it out and i can notice a difference. It definitely seems like it helps a fair bit but its insane that zos didnt catch this sooner. No wonder pvp performance is so bad, especially on console. And i hope they dont try to implement some sort of fix for this and then say " hey we fixed performance".. No. This wont solve all the performance issues in cyrodil but this is a good step and something that i will be doing from now on.

Its hard to tell how much it helped. Like ive ran into a few massive zerg fights and 100% noticed some difference. Then again ive had some small scale fights where i still had skill delay and lag with only like less than 10-20 people around. Its hard to test because this games performance has no rhyme or reason to it.

Either way, I always find it awesome when people share stuff to help the pvp community. And especially stuff on xbox. I see a lot of threads like this that only work for PC and its epic to finally see one that might actually work for console too.

Jadax · December 2018

How is this even a thing. I just don't even understand how something like this gets past a developer's QA team.

Att1Tude · December 2018

Jadax wrote: »

How is this even a thing. I just don't even understand how something like this gets past a developer's QA team.

It does tell something.

Tsukiino · December 2018

Tried this on PS4. I have 1 guild (trade guild) and did the "fix".

Went into vSO, midway through after the Troll Boss, frames just got worse (as per usual, always happens no matter what).

After all the add pulls leading to Ozara, the frames got worse.

The add pull before the Serpent and the Serpent HM fight was the peak of the horrible performance.

--

This "fix" doesn't really do much. It's still the same. Granted I'm on console, and the last time trials had GOOD performance was in One Tamriel update. So please fix this. It's been 2 years. It's overlooked.

kylewwefan · December 2018

Tsukiino wrote: »

Tried this on PS4. I have 1 guild (trade guild) and did the "fix".

Went into vSO, midway through after the Troll Boss, frames just got worse (as per usual, always happens no matter what).

After all the add pulls leading to Ozara, the frames got worse.

The add pull before the Serpent and the Serpent HM fight was the peak of the horrible performance.

--

This "fix" doesn't really do much. It's still the same. Granted I'm on console, and the last time trials had GOOD performance was in One Tamriel update. So please fix this. It's been 2 years. It's overlooked.

Sanctum was never that bad when you used to be able to scale it to 45, but it was still Vet...when elegant was the best drop from there. It’s been pretty suck ever since they “fixed it”.

Aurielle · December 2018

Tsukiino wrote: »

Tried this on PS4. I have 1 guild (trade guild) and did the "fix".

Went into vSO, midway through after the Troll Boss, frames just got worse (as per usual, always happens no matter what).

After all the add pulls leading to Ozara, the frames got worse.

The add pull before the Serpent and the Serpent HM fight was the peak of the horrible performance.

--

This "fix" doesn't really do much. It's still the same. Granted I'm on console, and the last time trials had GOOD performance was in One Tamriel update. So please fix this. It's been 2 years. It's overlooked.

Yeah, the OP didn’t say this was a fix for trials, so there’s no need for the sarcastic scare quotes. This fix helps with large scale PVP combat, in which there can be 50+ players on the screen at any given time.

Anyway, thank you so much for bringing this to our attention, OP.

I can’t wait to try this out at prime time. It’s a little insane that this bug slipped between the cracks, but at least ZOS has acknowledged it quickly.

Prince_of_all_Pugs · December 2018

Thanks Op , your the best seriously.

zaria · December 2018

Grimm13 wrote: »

Swomp23 wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

RMerlin wrote: »

cheifsoap wrote: »

fullheartcontainer wrote: »

Good job OP! This is definitely the kind of thing a real QC team should have picked up on. I really hope the devs are able to look into a solution to making this a default option. @ZOS_GinaBruno

Its such an obscure potential solution, no QA/QC team would have found this unless they stumbled upon it. Often times QA/QC teams are completely different people than the developers and unfortunately, due to the nature of the beast in most industries they're the first to be "trimmed"

If ZOS is dealing with lag issues, I would have expected them to do CPU profiling and network tracing to determine if there was any unusual amount of activity there?

Makes me wonder if in their attempts at improving performance they might have spent too much time looking at optimizing spell/skills stuff, and forgot to look at the basic stuff: network and CPU usage profiling.

Notice that it's not the first time something similar was found. A few years ago (can't remember for sure if it was ESO or another MMO I played in the past), I remember a lag cause was traced back to the quest journal. If it wasn't ESO, then that's another area I would suggest analyzing (to ensure the game isn't spending an insane amount of CPU/bandwidth dealing with potential quest updates).

Hopefully this will give ZOS new ideas of areas in need of reviewing to address the performance/stability issues that have been plaguing players since launch.

Note that the testers on the internal test servers will not have accounts on them with large guilds.
Probably not even the testers on live servers as the testing accounts are not private.

So yes this could easy slip below the radar for an very long time.
Makes me wonder why guild roaster need to be updated all the time, why not only then you open the menu?
Yes it should be an API call to for mods to use but its not something you need outside the page itself

I remember reading here a long time ago that ZOS would never allow their devs (or qa or wathever) to go to the live server with their developper accounts, because it would introduce imbalance or unfairness or wathever. I think this specefic policy is the root cause of what we are seeing here today. I mean, who would really care if developpers logged a couple hours a week in the live server with developers accounts comparable to the ones on pts. Yes they would have all cps and equipments freely available to use, but if the username would be clearly identified with a GM tag, I’m sure everyone would be happy to see them and tackle with them. This would allow for much better testing in the real environment, imo.

I remember in my teen days, when I was playing EQ, we would see GMs in-game pretty often. I don’t remember seeing a single one in ESO...

@ZOS_GinaBruno I see you still didn’t answer my previous question about ZOS’ long-term plan about performance issues. It’s kinda disappointing, it would have included itself pretty well with your new « we want to communicate better » policy...

I would be fine with a QA members going on live to test but they should oversight on them to ensure they do not grant favors or abuse their position. Maybe not be able to create anything themselves to be added for use, places a request with oversight if they can not or was not given the items/ powers to test.

I would also think they should not be tagged for public knowledge. they have a job to do and need to do it without having to answer questions or get harassed.

Yes, it would be accounts for doing stuff like queuing for random dungeons during event so they should not stand out, not GM as so rather for logging / debugging.
However they would still not be member of many guilds, making this hard to crack down.

Still it should show up in logs, logs helped me solve one of mine performance issues. In short it was an large user / project matrix who loaded very slowly, found that the reason was that I was keep asking for translations for user access and completion for all users x all projects rather than use variables for the 10 options and just translate once.

fgoron2000 · December 2018

jcm2606 wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno Maybe it's about time to have some of your internal testers (hopefully you guys have some) start testing for stupid crap like this. Even if it makes absolutely zero sense, don't worry about it, just test anyways.

what they actually need more than system "testers" are system "breakers"...I was at a job where I supervised the data entry team for a medical database. while i was there, we had gone through a several system changes, and at least one time we had to run two systems (outgoing and incoming) side-by-side for a couple months. I worked closely with the database programmer, and i prided myself with breaking things in the changes, so that we were able to ultimately fix them...

fgoron2000 · December 2018

I'm curious, when the refresh is done on guild rosters, which is apparently causing the issue being discussed here, does it scan all members of a guild, or all members of a guild who are currently online? My guild is large, having over 450 members, however, the number of players logged in at any given time is generally between 30 and 60 or so, sometimes lower. Although we're NA/PC based, we have members from all over the globe, so not everyone is in the same general timezones, playing at the same time. For instance, at least one of the officers is in London, yet plays primarily on the NA server.

Grimm13 · December 2018

zaria wrote: »

Grimm13 wrote: »

Swomp23 wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

RMerlin wrote: »

cheifsoap wrote: »

fullheartcontainer wrote: »

Good job OP! This is definitely the kind of thing a real QC team should have picked up on. I really hope the devs are able to look into a solution to making this a default option. @ZOS_GinaBruno

Its such an obscure potential solution, no QA/QC team would have found this unless they stumbled upon it. Often times QA/QC teams are completely different people than the developers and unfortunately, due to the nature of the beast in most industries they're the first to be "trimmed"

If ZOS is dealing with lag issues, I would have expected them to do CPU profiling and network tracing to determine if there was any unusual amount of activity there?

Makes me wonder if in their attempts at improving performance they might have spent too much time looking at optimizing spell/skills stuff, and forgot to look at the basic stuff: network and CPU usage profiling.

Notice that it's not the first time something similar was found. A few years ago (can't remember for sure if it was ESO or another MMO I played in the past), I remember a lag cause was traced back to the quest journal. If it wasn't ESO, then that's another area I would suggest analyzing (to ensure the game isn't spending an insane amount of CPU/bandwidth dealing with potential quest updates).

Hopefully this will give ZOS new ideas of areas in need of reviewing to address the performance/stability issues that have been plaguing players since launch.

Note that the testers on the internal test servers will not have accounts on them with large guilds.
Probably not even the testers on live servers as the testing accounts are not private.

So yes this could easy slip below the radar for an very long time.
Makes me wonder why guild roaster need to be updated all the time, why not only then you open the menu?
Yes it should be an API call to for mods to use but its not something you need outside the page itself

I remember reading here a long time ago that ZOS would never allow their devs (or qa or wathever) to go to the live server with their developper accounts, because it would introduce imbalance or unfairness or wathever. I think this specefic policy is the root cause of what we are seeing here today. I mean, who would really care if developpers logged a couple hours a week in the live server with developers accounts comparable to the ones on pts. Yes they would have all cps and equipments freely available to use, but if the username would be clearly identified with a GM tag, I’m sure everyone would be happy to see them and tackle with them. This would allow for much better testing in the real environment, imo.

I remember in my teen days, when I was playing EQ, we would see GMs in-game pretty often. I don’t remember seeing a single one in ESO...

@ZOS_GinaBruno I see you still didn’t answer my previous question about ZOS’ long-term plan about performance issues. It’s kinda disappointing, it would have included itself pretty well with your new « we want to communicate better » policy...

I would be fine with a QA members going on live to test but they should oversight on them to ensure they do not grant favors or abuse their position. Maybe not be able to create anything themselves to be added for use, places a request with oversight if they can not or was not given the items/ powers to test.

I would also think they should not be tagged for public knowledge. they have a job to do and need to do it without having to answer questions or get harassed.

Yes, it would be accounts for doing stuff like queuing for random dungeons during event so they should not stand out, not GM as so rather for logging / debugging.
However they would still not be member of many guilds, making this hard to crack down.

Still it should show up in logs, logs helped me solve one of mine performance issues. In short it was an large user / project matrix who loaded very slowly, found that the reason was that I was keep asking for translations for user access and completion for all users x all projects rather than use variables for the 10 options and just translate once.

Not being in large guilds could be solved as well. With creating guilds entirely of company made members

fgoron2000 wrote: »

I'm curious, when the refresh is done on guild rosters, which is apparently causing the issue being discussed here, does it scan all members of a guild, or all members of a guild who are currently online? My guild is large, having over 450 members, however, the number of players logged in at any given time is generally between 30 and 60 or so, sometimes lower. Although we're NA/PC based, we have members from all over the globe, so not everyone is in the same general timezones, playing at the same time. For instance, at least one of the officers is in London, yet plays primarily on the NA server.

It would be scanning all members of a guild. Reason, the online status could have changed since the last. So first it looks to see online or offline, if online where.

Dont_do_drugs · December 2018

fgoron2000 wrote: »

I'm curious, when the refresh is done on guild rosters, which is apparently causing the issue being discussed here, does it scan all members of a guild, or all members of a guild who are currently online? My guild is large, having over 450 members, however, the number of players logged in at any given time is generally between 30 and 60 or so, sometimes lower. Although we're NA/PC based, we have members from all over the globe, so not everyone is in the same general timezones, playing at the same time. For instance, at least one of the officers is in London, yet plays primarily on the NA server.

to me it seems like a guild roster gets completely refreshed as soon as the status of one person in that guild changed (zonechange, afk/dnd/online/offline, cp up, lvl up). this also is happening not only in the active guild but also the other 4 remaining guild, all the time. those refreshs can cause additional microlags, especially if you are in a couple of good raised guilds with 400 or 500 people and high activity rate. the addon i linked up in a previous comment blocks at least the roster form updating and might enhance the performance for some.

since i am in at least 4 500men guilds information about who did what has been pinging in all the time. i definitely see no use in the server spamming me with all that information instead of just doing it, when asked for (opening the guild roster). sure i can imagine, it would change a lot for some addons maybe, which are giving more information into the text window (shissus guild tools can show people in guilds going offline, online, afk and dnd modus and other stuff - but who tf uses that and who cares). i am pretty sure changing the amount of information coming to the user about what 3825682656725 other players do in their guilds would be pretty benefitial for everyone.

Grimm13 · December 2018

One thing I did forget previously is that I also run VotansAdvanceSettings addon. Am I getting excellent results because of both the Votan's and applying the GuildRoster Fix? IDK.

edit: It is possible that the Fix allows the Votans's more latitude to improve my performance.

Yolokin_Swagonborn · December 2018

Morgul667 wrote: »

Wow, is this real ?

SOMEONE TELL ME IS THIS REAL LIFE?

Can we have our torchbugs back in Cyrodiil now? It clearly wasn't their fault.

#TorchBugsDidNothingWrong

Syntax_Error · December 2018

Does it matter if I do this and 1) I'm marked offline or 2) I have the 'Hide Offline' option enabled in the guild window??

Also, does it make a difference if I do the search in a guild window/roster that has more active (not offline) people than another guild roster?

Thanks in advance for the answers and thanks also to OP!

Grimm13 · December 2018

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

Morgul667 wrote: »

Wow, is this real ?

SOMEONE TELL ME IS THIS REAL LIFE?

Can we have our torchbugs back in Cyrodiil now? It clearly wasn't their fault.

#TorchBugsDidNothingWrong

Page three, has the ZOS acknowledgement of issue, real enough?

Grimm13 · December 2018

Syntax_Error wrote: »

Does it matter if I do this and 1) I'm marked offline or 2) I have the 'Hide Offline' option enabled in the guild window??

Also, does it make a difference if I do the search in a guild window/roster that has more active (not offline) people than another guild roster?

Thanks in advance for the answers and thanks also to OP!

I do not believe that any of those matter. Have I tried 1 & 2 no, so you might experiment. But it's the search of all your guildmates that is causing the problems so you being offline does not matter as I believe you always really see yourself, nature of how the game has to work for you.

When applied to one guild it is applied to all.

Mureel · December 2018

JTET24 wrote: »

Wow, OP needs to be hired right away lol

Or OPs friend in random Cyro group lol

Qbiken · December 2018

Started using the Arkadius Guild Rooster Update Blocker and I notice a big difference. Used to have insane FPS drops in bigger cities and in PvP (could go from 40 down to 5-10). Haven´t had a single of those FPS drops since I started using the addon. Doesn´t help regarding latency however. But positive this worked tbh

Dont_do_drugs · December 2018

Qbiken wrote: »

Started using the Arkadius Guild Rooster Update Blocker and I notice a big difference. Used to have insane FPS drops in bigger cities and in PvP (could go from 40 down to 5-10). Haven´t had a single of those FPS drops since I started using the addon. Doesn´t help regarding latency however. But positive this worked tbh

I am glad about the positive feedback. I also was unsure how much people will feel the difference, when i started using the script for me alone. In the beginning i already had a more fluent feeling while running around. Since sunday I am sure, there is a noticeable difference for me, I also guess u notice it more in "stressfull" situations than in normal questing/running around. Sunday had been my personal stress test, and yeh, it was noticable.

WeyounTM · December 2018

If this really fixes some of the ongoing issues....it would be a godsend and I can't believe it. Way back when one of my guildmaster started kicking inactive player from the roster we noticed that every time the kick occured and the message "X has left the guild" popped up a HUGE lagspike would occur. Switching to a different guild while the kickwave was going on "resolved" the issue.

And I wonder if there is more of these underlyings things going on. Everytime I watch for example Fengrush stream I cannot help but notice the messages in the top right corner for example "Target is immune" lagging behind....even long after a fight is done. I have installed the "no thank you" Addon for that, but maybe there are some gremlins in these systems as well. Might be worth checking out @ZOS_GinaBruno

alainjbrennanb16_ESO · December 2018

not sure if this would help me, i change my affinity every time i play eso so cpu usage is only 20% when i play, but this is interesting

Trancestor · December 2018

Doesnt do crap for me

ZarkingFrued · December 2018

@ZOS_GinaBruno can you folks over at the office look into making it so this only runs when you open the guild roster up? If it stopped running when you weren't looking at it, it may be a huge advantage

Grimm13 · December 2018

ZarkingFrued wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno can you folks over at the office look into making it so this only runs when you open the guild roster up? If it stopped running when you weren't looking at it, it may be a huge advantage

Page 3, they are...

DaveMoeDee · December 2018

cheifsoap wrote: »

fullheartcontainer wrote: »

Good job OP! This is definitely the kind of thing a real QC team should have picked up on. I really hope the devs are able to look into a solution to making this a default option. @ZOS_GinaBruno

Its such an obscure potential solution, no QA/QC team would have found this unless they stumbled upon it. Often times QA/QC teams are completely different people than the developers and unfortunately, due to the nature of the beast in most industries they're the first to be "trimmed"

Vapirko wrote: »

I can’t tell much difference on PC but glad it’s working for consoles. Performance is notoriously worse on console I guess. But I haven’t had any huge battles yet so I’ll test it more.

YMMV if you're on PC. The configurations are drastically different between PC and consoles and who knows the development cycle for the console port...

Yeah, not the kind of thing QA would find. QA will let you know was does and doesn’t work, but they aren’t going to turn features on and off to see what impact it has. Devs investigating issues would do that.

When performance is that bad, it would be nice to be able to turn off features one at a time. The problem is doing that for every feature and then testing at prime time loads. Due to the level of resourcing needed to test countless possible tweaks at load, it isn’t surprising when devs pick what they think is a most likely culprit and roll out a hopeful change.

Some might reply “how much would it really cost to have tried disabling this one feature on the live servers?” Thing is, there could be hundreds of candidates to try to disable. Still, it would be nice if they had a list of all such processes and the ability to toggle them on and off. Hopefully this pans out though. I wonder if the process itself is a problem, or if there was just a bad choice in implementation that made it so impactful.

ZarkingFrued · December 2018

Grimm13 wrote: »

ZarkingFrued wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno can you folks over at the office look into making it so this only runs when you open the guild roster up? If it stopped running when you weren't looking at it, it may be a huge advantage

Page 3, they are...

Cool...

cyberblast · December 2018

You would find such a thing by profiling network load or application processes (e.g. class/function calls). Such things need to be done during a performance analysis - especially when developing a public facing internet server application - very especially when dealing with a heavy load real time application on what they call a mega server.
But we should be happy now that finally something has been found...