[Fixed 68373] low FPS and hitching / GUI causing huge lag

im in Brit fort most times, I was at your town yesterday but was already lagging, so I will zone there later, log out and back in see if after 10-20min I get the lag. lag also seems to only be in one direction most times (West,South seem really bad regardless what side of towns im on). Showed it to CICI last night he could se me lagging in only certian directions, its real strange not full on lag most times, but gets worse and worse till have relog.

 

So I ran around Brittany Fort for about 25 minutes, checking everything out (including your very nice City Lot), but just visiting and running around the area for 25 minutes, I saw no extreme slowdowns. I stayed around 25-35 FPS:



04/01/2020 21:15
User Specs:
OS: Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1620 0 @ 3.60GHz (8) System RAM: 16303
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPU RAM: 8079
SotA.Win.64.1156.Date.03.31.20
Area: POT_swamp_metropolis_01_template/Brittany Fort
Area Display Name: Brittany Fort
Loc: (41.9, 38.0, 197.4)
Debug: UE9UX3N3YW1wX21ldHJvcG9saXNfMDFfdGVtcGxhdGV8QnJpdHRhbnkgRm9ydHwoNDEuOTQ4LCAzNy45OTcsIDE5Ny4zNjUpfCgwLCAxLCAwLCAtMC4wMTcpfDI0MTEuODMzfDIyLjI3OTE1fDcuMjc2MTE3

Nvidia 445.75 Drivers

At least from an observer standpoint there doesn't seem to be any slowdowns. No one else was in the scene with me at this time though. And I wasn't doing any deco (like you have been doing).

Some other factor might be causing these slowdowns?

 

thanks for checking, Im not sure what it is. its just in towns, in my dungeons or adventure areas I run steady 100FPS.

 

Well strange today I have been playing awhile, nothing updated on PC and im back to how I use to be, lag only hits if I teleport to 3 or more towns looking at vendors, so completely playable 37-45 FPS maxed graphics in town 90-100 FPS adventure areas/dungeons. not sure why it fixed nothing changed on my end. but glad it did, thanks to all the effort to help from players, really could not play with 3-4 FPS, almost rage quit for awhile lol.

 

It's pretty amazing that SotA buried my new machine so easily.

04/09/2020 08:02
Title: Very low FPS.
Reproduction Rate: After any length of play.
Blocker?
Details: FPS goes down to 10 at crunch .23.

Steps to Reproduce: Usually by changing scenes.

User Specs:
OS: Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor (24) System RAM: 32716
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER GPU RAM: 8011
SotA.Win.64.1159.Date.04.02.20
Area: SiegeEncounter_Forest01_Road/POT_grassland_metropolis_01_template/Ordinis Mortis
Area Display Name: Forest Siege
Loc: (63.8, 24.0, 52.7)
Debug: U2llZ2VFbmNvdW50ZXJfRm9yZXN0MDFfUm9hZHxQT1RfZ3Jhc3NsYW5kX21ldHJvcG9saXNfMDFfdGVtcGxhdGUvT3JkaW5pcyBNb3J0aXN8KDYzLjgxMSwgMjMuOTk4LCA1Mi42NjUpfCgwLCAtMC45MzMsIDAsIDAuMzU5KXwtMjY1OS44MzN8MC4yODEwMzI5fDYuNDAzNzI5

 

Im still getting this if I stay in a town to long or go to multiple towns, but at least I can play most the time, have to restart after visiting about 3 towns. or staying at my home for more then 30 mins.

 

Still very bad for me as well.

Also the crashing has been bad the past few weeks.

I think there are multiple hitching sources, not just one. The two ones that seem big are client/server resync and

I think the following still might need to be done:
1. Check network code for proper handling of robustness against lost and delayed packets. If a data reception is not confirmed the necessary data to reconstruct the lost time-frame in the minimum necessary (but not perfect) detail should be sent unsolicited in every packet until the connection is properly recovered. The small amount of additional bandwidth for this is worth saving the bandwidth and delay of being asked for this information.
2. Check that the all temporary variables on the client and server are using TLAB (Thread Local Allocation Buffer) as opposed to heap allocation. This will drastically reduce heap management overhead and drastically reduce memory leaking on both the client and server. Adjust code to reduce total dynamic allocation size and temporary variable usage.
3. Check that as many items and inventories as possible are using proper reserved fixed type objects, and arrays of fixed type objects instead of B-Tree. Array of objects handles better with heap performance, and a generic object that includes the necessary data can be created. If a B-Tree database is necessary, make it external using SQL, SQLite or some other database (I'm partial to SQLite, myself.)
4. Check that proper opportunities are being used for clearing the GC. For instance, during scene transition there are two GC opportunities. First, after clearing the old scene, second after finishing loading the new scene.
5. Consider using the Incremental GC in Unity 2019 and 2020. This is only a band-aid and won't work if your heap management isn't good enough, but it is a surprisingly good band-aid.

 

Did some testing tonight with hitching while doing some mining in Etceter Crag Mines.

First off ... Lua.
I have some Lua scripts I've written - mostly inventory tracking stuff.

I tested both unloading/reloading Lua and "disabling" the Lua scripts (renamed the Lua directory) and restarting Shroud.

End result was that I found little to no difference with hitching when the Lua scripts are loaded / not loaded.

Now for what I found interesting.

I tried raising the priority of the Shroud process from "Normal" to "High" and up to "Real Time". Priority seemed to make no difference.

During this testing I had Windows Resource Monitor running in the other monitor with a 1 second refresh. I noticed that during all of the longer hitches there was a very noticeable drop in CPU utilization - as if the Shroud process was getting de-scheduled from the CPU.

 

This is pretty frequent now. I've had it start in big fights, but mostly by changing scenes.

 

OK, so some additional results. Tonight did the same thing ... Windows Resource Monitor up on the other monitor. I see a spike in disk activity corresponding with each hitch. So, perhaps the reason there's a dip in CPU utilization is because the Shroud process is in I/O wait. Caught the wait chain with some quick reflexes during one of those hitches:


I also checked for wait chains while not hitching. Not once did I get a wait while not also hitching.

 

well after what ever patched today, talked to oracle for daily gold/xp, went straight to lagging afterward, and most of the lighting is not working again.

 

I can confirm that I am having serious issues with my rtx 2080ti. Checked the performance during the slow down and noticed the card using 11 gigs of memory while utilizing 90% of the card. It slows down so much it's unplayable around 5 to 8 minutes into the game. I also reverted to an older driver to check to see if the latest nvidia driver utilizing the new dlss feature could be the issue and same issue prior to the new nvidia patch.

 

What CPU are you using? Just wondering. I see alot of us have Ryzen with RTX GPU's. Im on 3800X with 2080ti.

 

I'm on the a Ryzen 3950x. Yeah, I was wondering if that could be part of the issue. The thing is before the latest patches it did work for a bit with no problems. Something in the latest releases is taking up a ton of cpu computations.

 

Well, it's not related to resolution, but quality settings. I can put everything at max for 5-10 min until it slowly crawls to a stop or I can set quality settings to fastest and I can play for the most part with some slow down. This is completely different on my other computer that has an i7 with a 1080ti and it can play at 4k with everything set to max. On my 3950x with a 2080ti I get worse performance for some reason.

 

It's so sad to see we did not get any official response from devs in this thread.

Still unplayable and I stopped playing for now.

 

Temporary workaround based on @Chris 's Tweet:
I turned off nameplates to eliminate the 'font bug' temporarily and it seems to be helping a LOT with the performance issues.

 

Made a video of my lag, ,I run great when first log in 40-60FPS in towns, 80-100FPS adventure areas. then after 15-20 mins I get 1-4FPS mostly happens in towns or when in group. I have reset everything as my posts before explain and my roommate is running fine on my old mid range PC. Did not have an issue until 2 months ago, ran perfect before. SoTA is the only game giving me issues.

 

Revising this thread. What Araminas reports is still the norm for 2080 rtx or titan rtx cards.

 

A lot of NRE error spews in my player.log file (see on my crash report thread) they might be related. NREs can cause hitching and low frame rates in Unity.

However, some NREs type events can be platform specific. Linux builds tend to get hit bad by them for some reason.