Guild Wars 2

Not sure if this is a common issue (tried to search and didn’t find a lot) but I noticed a significant delay in texture and world pop-in when entering maps (15 seconds before full load) and also when first launching the character selection screen (30 seconds – 1 minute on a blank screen)

I’ve always experienced a delay since I have GW2 installed on a 5400 rpm drive, but they seem to be getting worse while there has been no change in drive performance or latency. Thoughts on how to remedy or is this a server/client issue?

It’s happening for me, as well. It’s not the first time. Certain patches seem to cause this, and then a few (or several) patches later it will clear up, again. /shrug

The most likely causes for this are delays reading content from disk, or delays reading content from the network. The 5400RPM drive is a good candidate for this.

You might try defragmenting your drive — usually, that’s not much of a thing of relevance, but the biggest thing that a slower drive like that means is lower random read performance, because it takes longer to find stuff on disk.

If the new patch put some content scattered further away, that’s going to take longer to find, and that could contribute to a delay popping in the content if it is done “when it is ready”.

Defragmenting should put the content closer together which, while not perfect, could help reduce the amount of seeking required to load it all.

If the issue is network, other than making sure you don’t have long delays (eg: large downloads, torrents, etc) going on at the same time, there isn’t much you can do to instantly improve it.

Or, sometimes, it is neither of the above, as it affects large swatches of the population as before, and the Devs acknowledge and tinker with the engine.

It may just be that, yet again.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Or, sometimes, it is neither of the above, as it affects large swatches of the population as before, and the Devs acknowledge and tinker with the engine.

It may just be that, yet again.

Sorry, I should have quoted, so it was clear my suggestions were directed to the OP. I have no speculation regarding what may be hitting your game.

It’s almost inevitable that with a single file the size of gw2.db that bits of it get whacked. “Repairing” it periodically can be useful or, if you have the HD space, making a copy and renaming it (which accomplishes something similar). Although current versions of Windows aim to prevent fragmentation, the system doesn’t really work for gw2.db.

tl;dr

• Repair your game or
• Copy the gw2.db and rename it

I was even going to suggest defragmenting your HD indeed. I also have noticed that stuff takes a bit longer to load after each patch and fragmentation seems to play a role on it yes. I took the habit to defragment the GW2.dat file after big patches and it seemed to reduce the issue.

A good tool for this could be Defraggler, it’s free and it allows you to defrag a single file instead the whole drive. GW2.dat is a huge file and it’s highly possible it will fragment with patches.

If you don’t have a defrag tool like that, copying the file could help, although it wouldn’t fix the fragmentation but reduce the fragments instead (however, if your HD is too busy when you do that, the effect could be the opposite, more fragmentation).

Windows comes with a built-in defrag tool that’s supposed to keep a low fragmentation rate, but although it keeps that lower than what older versions did my personal experience has showed it’s not that effective though.

To OP: I would suggest running Defraggler or any tool that allows you to defrag a single file and defrag at least the GW2.dat file (for faster results. You could defrag the whole drive for an overall performance but the process could take a lot longer). A caveat: if you have kitten drive, excessive defragmentation could worn out your drive and reduce it’s lifetime though.

I usually see that right after the game has loaded. After playing for a while it goes away although that is still only in some locations.

Khisanth.2948:

I usually see that right after the game has loaded. After playing for a while it goes away although that is still only in some locations.

That exactly describes the file being cached in memory — slow to load the first time, but fast afterwards, until you hit something not yet cached which causes it to be slow.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It’s almost inevitable that with a single file the size of gw2.db that bits of it get whacked. “Repairing” it periodically can be useful or, if you have the HD space, making a copy and renaming it (which accomplishes something similar). Although current versions of Windows aim to prevent fragmentation, the system doesn’t really work for gw2.db.

tl;dr

• Repair your game or
• Copy the gw2.db and rename it

Systems to avoid fragmentation work passably, but the longer the delay between writes, the harder it is for them to succeed. GW2 patches are weeks apart, being the most painful case for that.

As to corruption — even on cheap consumer drives, bit-flips are less than one per full read, on the 8TB drives, so it’s not the most common source of problems. That said, it’s also inexpensive to run the repair process, so y’all should def. try it.

(Defragment after repair, since it may cause deletes, writes, and rewrites to the file.)

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Khisanth.2948:

I usually see that right after the game has loaded. After playing for a while it goes away although that is still only in some locations.

That exactly describes the file being cached in memory — slow to load the first time, but fast afterwards, until you hit something not yet cached which causes it to be slow.

Except that is like that even when going to places I haven’t been to in weeks.

Probably more likely that at startup there are many things that need loading and these things have an incorrect priority set on them so they are being loaded later than intended.

Khisanth.2948:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Khisanth.2948:

I usually see that right after the game has loaded. After playing for a while it goes away although that is still only in some locations.

That exactly describes the file being cached in memory — slow to load the first time, but fast afterwards, until you hit something not yet cached which causes it to be slow.

Except that is like that even when going to places I haven’t been to in weeks.

Probably more likely that at startup there are many things that need loading and these things have an incorrect priority set on them so they are being loaded later than intended.

…or the textures and models are also used elsewhere in the game, so are preloaded? Anyway, it’s just speculation, ultimately.

Just wanted to put in there that if you have kitten, you basically don’t want to be defragging your system. People with an SSD shouldn’t have this issue anyway, but defragmenting kitten will only burn through some of its write cycles, and won’t improve performance, because the drives have built-in algorithms to spread writes out across the SSD to ensure the maximum longevity of the drive. Defragmenting assumes the system knows the physical layout of the drive and can reliably write to a physical location.

cyn.2157:

Just wanted to put in there that if you have kitten, you basically don’t want to be defragging your system. People with an SSD shouldn’t have this issue anyway, but defragmenting kitten will only burn through some of its write cycles, and won’t improve performance, because the drives have built-in algorithms to spread writes out across the SSD to ensure the maximum longevity of the drive. Defragmenting assumes the system knows the physical layout of the drive and can reliably write to a physical location.

In my suggestion above I made a remark about SSD too, defragmenting a SDD drive could reduce its lifetime due the number or reads/writes during defragmentation process. Defragmenting kitten drive isn’t recommended and, in fact, shouldn’t be needed.