Guild Wars 2

I know this has been mentioned, reported, asked, complained about etc etc but I just have to ask myself and hope to get some sort of reply from Arenanet on it.

What in the Underworld is going on with the map loading times of late? Its getting slower and slower after each patch. I’m running a brand new Samsung SSD EVO and the loading times just for Lions Arch for example can take up to or even over a minute to load… This is not one for a game that has been out for over a year, I’m getting tot he point where I really don’t give a skritt about new living stories etc as of right now I care little for living stories etc and more about the performance of the games that seems to be deteriorating faster and faster with every patch and living story released. When the game first released I could load Lions Arch for example or any map within seconds now its like within minutes….

The loading times between my SSD and my Western Digital VelociRaptor is not much different, SSD might load a couple of seconds faster than the VelociRaptor (even after several defragmentations….

I dare not actually time the loading times with a stopwatch in fair of having a heart attack at the results…

Although read speed on the disk drive plays a huge role, the CPU and network quality also play a role.

If your CPU isn’t up to par, decompression times will increase therefore making loading times longer.

If you are experiencing packet loss while loading, the game will wait until the connection is successful.

Map loading times have gone up by quite a bit for me. Loading into Lion’s Arch used to take 3-5 seconds, now it takes 17-20 seconds. Other zones which had 2-3 second load times are now taking around 11-14 seconds. The only thing which has changed recently on my system is the game’s own updates.

I followed the information in another post on the Tech Support forum on how to measure map loading times, and the loading of models is what’s taking so very, very long: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/How-to-accurately-measure-map-loading-times

With all video settings at the very lowest, load times are reduced… slightly… but they are still exponentially longer than they ever used to be.

(Running dual SSDs in raid 0.)

Loading times are pretty bad for me aswell, CPU is barely being used, plenty of RAM, latency to the server isn’t great (given I’m in South Africa) but it’s not horrible either. Connection for the most part is stable. So yeah.

Nep Leet.5491:

Map loading times have gone up by quite a bit for me. Loading into Lion’s Arch used to take 3-5 seconds, now it takes 17-20 seconds. Other zones which had 2-3 second load times are now taking around 11-14 seconds. The only thing which has changed recently on my system is the game’s own updates.

I followed the information in another post on the Tech Support forum on how to measure map loading times, and the loading of models is what’s taking so very, very long: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/How-to-accurately-measure-map-loading-times

With all video settings at the very lowest, load times are reduced… slightly… but they are still exponentially longer than they ever used to be.

(Running dual SSDs in raid 0.)

Yeah that was my thread. Glad it helped pinpoint your issue.

I isolated the issues for the load times down, some time ago.

2 issues

1. Disk layer fragmentation
2. gw2.dat fragmentation issues.

If you are lucky and have access to Disk Keeper you can visually see the fragmentation that goes on in the gw2.dat file. And it gets worse with every update. And no, Disk Keeper cannot fix it as the data file is locked out.

The only current fix, that I have found, is to delete the gw2.dat and rebuild it from scratch (let the game updater download the entire game data stream in one go) as it writes the files to the data file, its not fragmenting the data all over the place.

Fragmentation isn’t a problem with SSDs.

I’ve noticed that the culling code, well I assume it’s related to the culling code, is really munching the HD. For instance if I zone into LA via the gates and first wait for the load to be complete, watching the I/O activity of the game in Process Explorer to drop, and then run to the MF drive activity shoots up to 30-50MB/s from under 5MB/s (5 sec running average) and will remain there for nearly a minute or more until all the player’s generic avatars are replaced with actual ones. This activity also mutes/prevents all the ambient sound from playing until the avatar generation is nearly complete. I assume because of all the drive activity.

Then I/O activity drops back in the low single digit MB/s range, until I run over to the TP where I find more generic avatars only to drop back down once the generic ones vanish. Run back to the bank or the MF and the I/O surge starts all over again as I return to a sea of generic avatars. My culling settings are high/high.

Also during these times my frame rate drops a bit. I imagine that with SSDs that my over a minute I/O activity is sharply reduced but it won’t be eliminated. Also I’ve noticed is when you first enter a zone, via gate or waypoint (not inzone waypoint to waypoint) that the game delays exiting the loading screen until nearly everything is fully realized including other player’s avatars. Maybe that’s the delay players are seeing if they are logging into LA by the bank, TP or MF.

Behellagh.1468:

Fragmentation isn’t a problem with SSDs.

It is when the file is encapsulated and setup like a database file.

Take a look at gw2.dat, the entire game sits in that one file, which gw2.exe opens up and locks out so defragging tools cannot ‘fix’ the files internal structor.

Looking over the wiki I think I have some idea that might be really causing the loading times;

The Gw.dat metafile is series of 512 bytes blocks and internal files take up one or more consecutive blocks. When files are updated they can either be overwritten in place or, if too large, added to the end or perhaps another larger free area.

The line in bold is what causes the fragmentation in the gw2.dat file. It is setup like a SQL database (MDF/LDF), and even if properly indexed, chunking files that are supposed to be continuous around to the end cause they exceed the block size of the old file will cause fragmentation. This is why when I delete the gw2.dat file and let it recreate it from the down loader, my load times are fixed.

Lets look at LA’s updates, we had stuff push and pulled from LA 6 times this year (Broken fountain, upgraded fountain, vendors added, Event added then removed/..ect).

If a graphic or context was bigger then 512bytes, then that block of data was erased and the new data would be shuffled to the end of the gw2.dat data file. This method can and will screw up the context in such a file (Think like MS Access DB files).

So, there are a few things that anet could do to help;

1. put a defragger in the gw2.exe client that we can run, it basically will delete unused 512Byte Blocks, and resort the data so it makes sense when accessing different parts of the game (if LA was on Blocks 29,000-68,000, and the new textures are on blocks 235,000-285,000 that is VERY BAD on the drives IOPS – Esp Sata drives that only have 75IOPS)

2. Put an option in the gw2.exe client to rebuild the gw2.dat file from scratch – probably a quicker fix, but it will take forever to download all that data again.

3. Write to the gw2.dat file, RFC proper, and treat it like a MS Access file. Truncate the data properly and re-index after each patch (which I doubt they are doing).

If something isnt done, its just going to get worse.

I remember awhile back that Turbine created a defragger app for their huge LotRO data files. Folks could download it and defrag those specific data files and it really made a difference.

And yes, ANet needs to come up with a solution, ’cuz every two weeks getting stuff added/removed/shuffled about is going to only aggravate this issue more and more over time.

SSDs don’t have the same problem with head seeking as standard hard drives. That’s why 4K random reads are 100x faster than a hard drive.

All “sector/clusters” on an SSD are completely remappable, they aren’t “next” to one another or in any particular order. Defragging doesn’t guarantee that they will be when it’s done, only that it looks that way on the file system level.

Behellagh.1468:

SSDs don’t have the same problem with head seeking as standard hard drives. That’s why 4K random reads are 100x faster than a hard drive.

All “sector/clusters” on an SSD are completely remappable, they aren’t “next” to one another or in any particular order. Defragging doesn’t guarantee that they will be when it’s done, only that it looks that way on the file system level.

the issue I am talking about is not a file system issue. Its with how the data in the .dat file is handled. and no SSD can circumvent it. Even with how the SSDs handle sectors. A bad file configuration is still a bad file configuration.

Arg! * whine *

I deleted and then downloaded the entire Gw2.dat file and, most unfortunately, it did nothing to improve my map loading times.

They tell me how defragging the file system would help with a device that actual data arrangement isn’t reflected by the FILE SYSTEM!!!

Defragging helps eliminate excess head seeks and allow consecutive data to follow one another so the head doesn’t have to either move or wait for another rotation to get the next sector/cluster.

So what if gw2.dat is one ginormous file, other than being a pain to backup onto a USB key if you don’t have one big enough. I imagine that unlike other MMOs which divide the assets into classes, each with a file like sound, world geometry, world texture, player geometry, player texture, etc. they are simply concatenated together with an index up front to each section with each section with it’s own index to individual assets. Or do you think it’s a mishmash of assets with one honking index up front to all of them?

Doesn’t matter if it’s a dozen files or just one, they all end up going though the SATA device driver and in the end are a series of reads, no parallelism.

So you think that when new or modified assets are added to the game that they are merely appended to the end? And your form of defragging is defragging assets for proximity and not really the file from a file system POV.

This is where we disagree. You believe it’s organized like a database. I believe it’s organized like a simple nested archive, maybe compressed, maybe not. So unless someone tear the dat file apart to see if it is a database or an archive (turning to the moderator But it would be wrong) we just have to disagree with each other.

http://youtu.be/UnI81iB0gBQ?t=1m27s

We really need an option to defrag the Gw.dat file as new content every fortnight is just going to make the game more and more slow to load, since the latest patch its taking me one or two maybe even three minutes to load Lion’s Arch when loading the client/ game for the first time.

Was kinda hoping to have someone from Arenanet would have at the very least acknowledge this topic by replying or something but that’s probably wishful thinking….

Oh and I really do not fancy re downloading the game every two weeks just to a clean Gw.dat when that would use up my monthly bandwidth allowance…. I don’t fancy being capped at dial-up speeds thank you very much lol