Improving Load Times

[ADPowah]

On the forums there are multiple threads talking about how specific planets take a while to load. Unfortunately there is little to no dialogue on how to improve load times, rather the conversations go something like this:

 

User1: "my load times suck"

User2: "Get a new computer"

User1: "My computer is great, runs single_player_game01 at 1,000 FPS on uber ultra"

 

So what I am looking for are people that HAD horrible load times (1 minute+) that have RESOLVED them. What did you do? What was the issue?

[arcdaemon]

No one cares about load times.

[paul_preib]

On the forums there are multiple threads talking about how specific planets take a while to load. Unfortunately there is little to no dialogue on how to improve load times, rather the conversations go something like this:

 

User1: "my load times suck"

User2: "Get a new computer"

User1: "My computer is great, runs single_player_game01 at 1,000 FPS on uber ultra"

 

So what I am looking for are people that HAD horrible load times (1 minute+) that have RESOLVED them. What did you do? What was the issue?

 

From what I've read these load times are very much Hard drive based so all the horsepower in the world in other avenues won't change a whole lot. So your best solutions for speeding up times would be a solid state drive or its budget alternative of installing it to a flash drive instead.

 

 

From a recent upgrade in CPU and graphics card that made tremendous strides in-game (25-35 fps on mid-low settings to 70-80 on high) I noticed my load time was basically unaltered which is evidence to me that the above is true.

[Criosdh]

The load times off the harddrive in this game are horrid. I have no idea why it takes so long but it is absolutely mind boggling. Like a few minutes to load Correlia when in most MMOs I barely see the loading screen in most cases.

 

I'm not sure why it is as I don't think the old republic is especially graphic intensive.

[codyr]

On the forums there are multiple threads talking about how specific planets take a while to load. Unfortunately there is little to no dialogue on how to improve load times, rather the conversations go something like this:

 

User1: "my load times suck"

User2: "Get a new computer"

User1: "My computer is great, runs single_player_game01 at 1,000 FPS on uber ultra"

 

So what I am looking for are people that HAD horrible load times (1 minute+) that have RESOLVED them. What did you do? What was the issue?

 

there's a thread somewhere on the forums about loading the data to a RAMDISK, which apparently can drastically reduce planet load times.

[skinthinner]

It appears that partway through the load, the client goes out to the server and dynamically loads the server stats, people around, etc.

 

This is NOT dependent on just the hard drive, but their server, their encryption/decryption process and other various things... the bigger the area and more folks, the slower the load (think ship vs. Corellia).

 

In other words yes, a fast drive will work better, but there will be a bottle neck on the communication and other things that are outside of the load times.

[ironix]

From what I've read these load times are very much Hard drive based so all the horsepower in the world in other avenues won't change a whole lot. So your best solutions for speeding up times would be a solid state drive or its budget alternative of installing it to a flash drive instead.

 

 

From a recent upgrade in CPU and graphics card that made tremendous strides in-game (25-35 fps on mid-low settings to 70-80 on high) I noticed my load time was basically unaltered which is evidence to me that the above is true.

 

In another thread a week or two ago I did some testing with regards to the load times. Here were my results:

 

System specs:

• Windows 7 64-bit
  
• Intel i7 @ 3.2GHz
  
• 16GB of DDR3 RAM running @ 2000MHz
  
• 4x120GB SSD drives running in RAID-0
  
• 2xATI 4870x2 in SLI
  

 

Loading Times: (used the space bar to skip all cut scenes of the ship flying down)

• Imperial Fleet: 14 seconds
  
• My Ship: 8 seconds
  
• Alderaan: 55 seconds
  
• Balmorra: 32 seconds
  
• Corellia: 58 seconds
  
• Voss (because my alt is there): 35 seconds
  

 

I consider some of these loading times to be annoying at the very least. I couldn't imagine what they're like for people who don't have a beast of a system to run this game.

 

EDIT: Given someone suggested my 2nd generation SSDs aren't fast enough to speed up the load times, I present the following numbers for my RAID-0 setup using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1c:

• Sequential: Read - 687.4 MB/s, Write 258.9 MB/s
  
• Random: Read - 441.9 MB/s, Write 287.7 MB/s
  

 

An interesting addendum to these results is that I was watching disk IO while it was loading Corellia. It very rarely spiked above 10MB/s. This tends to agree with my RAM disk tests and my RAM level 2 cache buffer tests (FancyCache). The load times NEVER changed no matter what I did to reduce, eliminate, or buffer disk I/O. So... If someone is telling you it is a HDD bottleneck, it really doesn't seem to be the case.

[ZincThallinide]

In my experience, loading from an SSD instead of an HD is a little faster, but yes, it's true, it doesn't make much difference.

 

The game is just bizarrely unoptimized when it comes to loading areas.

[Jett-Rinn]

No one cares about load times.

 

Speak for yourself.

[paul_preib]

In another thread a week or two ago I did some testing with regards to the load times. Here were my results:

 

System specs:

• Windows 7 64-bit
  
• Intel i7 @ 3.2GHz
  
• 16GB of DDR3 RAM running @ 2000MHz
  
• 4x120GB SSD drives running in RAID-0
  
• 2xATI 4870x2 in SLI
  

 

Loading Times: (used the space bar to skip all cut scenes of the ship flying down)

• Imperial Fleet: 14 seconds
  
• My Ship: 8 seconds
  
• Alderaan: 55 seconds
  
• Balmorra: 32 seconds
  
• Corellia: 58 seconds
  
• Voss (because my alt is there): 35 seconds
  

 

I consider some of these loading times to be annoying at the very least. I couldn't imagine what they're like for people who don't have a beast of a system to run this game.

 

EDIT: Given someone suggested my 2nd generation SSDs aren't fast enough to speed up the load times, I present the following numbers for my RAID-0 setup using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1c:

• Sequential: Read - 687.4 MB/s, Write 258.9 MB/s
  
• Random: Read - 441.9 MB/s, Write 287.7 MB/s
  

 

An interesting addendum to these results is that I was watching disk IO while it was loading Corellia. It very rarely spiked above 10MB/s. This tends to agree with my RAM disk tests and my RAM level 2 cache buffer tests (FancyCache). The load times NEVER changed no matter what I did to reduce, eliminate, or buffer disk I/O. So... If someone is telling you it is a HDD bottleneck, it really doesn't seem to be the case.

 

 

Interesting read and glad someone went and did the actual legwork for something like this. I will be curious to see when something else using the hero engine (such as elder scrolls) has similar issues which would speak to it being a tied to server, coding, or engine.

[LukeSaberRattler]

Wasn't it already determine that the slow loads times was due to the client waiting for server side responses? Nothing you can do to your system would fix that. Sure an SSD would improve it slightly but not much. The only way load times get better is when Bioware improves the server response times client side requests.

[Thundergulch]

Wasn't it already determine that the slow loads times was due to the client waiting for server side responses? Nothing you can do to your system would fix that. Sure an SSD would improve it slightly but not much. The only way load times get better is when Bioware improves the server response times client side requests.

 

This is EXACTLY the issue, it's not our computers, I play on 2 different computers (work and home) and my work computer is brand new with almost no programs installed except for my CAD/CAM program, the load times are almost the same.

 

It's their hardware, not ours.

[glazia]

No one cares about load times.

i care about load times they need to fix it soon i play other MMO games and never have a problem with loading into zones this is the only game i have trouble with cause there system can not handle it. i get tired of people trying to say its your problem but its not its bioware's problem and needs to get fixed

[codyr]

Wasn't it already determine that the slow loads times was due to the client waiting for server side responses? Nothing you can do to your system would fix that. Sure an SSD would improve it slightly but not much. The only way load times get better is when Bioware improves the server response times client side requests.

 

this isn't the full picture. it's true that the client-server communication is what slows it down, but it's more precisely that the game institutes a blocking call during this communication, rather than finishing the load and waiting for the server to respond with the other data. while the client is loading the world, it should be communicating asynchronously with the server, but it doesn't. it completely stops the load every time there's a client-server request. so it's not exactly that their servers are slow, or that our connections to their servers are slow, it's that the load is never fluid and continuous. it starts and stops repeatedly during that loading screen. that's just bad programming.

[ZaRree]

In another thread a week or two ago I did some testing with regards to the load times. Here were my results:

 

System specs:

• Windows 7 64-bit
  
• Intel i7 @ 3.2GHz
  
• 16GB of DDR3 RAM running @ 2000MHz
  
• 4x120GB SSD drives running in RAID-0
  
• 2xATI 4870x2 in SLI
  

 

Loading Times: (used the space bar to skip all cut scenes of the ship flying down)

• Imperial Fleet: 14 seconds
  
• My Ship: 8 seconds
  
• Alderaan: 55 seconds
  
• Balmorra: 32 seconds
  
• Corellia: 58 seconds
  
• Voss (because my alt is there): 35 seconds
  

 

I consider some of these loading times to be annoying at the very least. I couldn't imagine what they're like for people who don't have a beast of a system to run this game.

 

EDIT: Given someone suggested my 2nd generation SSDs aren't fast enough to speed up the load times, I present the following numbers for my RAID-0 setup using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1c:

• Sequential: Read - 687.4 MB/s, Write 258.9 MB/s
  
• Random: Read - 441.9 MB/s, Write 287.7 MB/s
  

 

An interesting addendum to these results is that I was watching disk IO while it was loading Corellia. It very rarely spiked above 10MB/s. This tends to agree with my RAM disk tests and my RAM level 2 cache buffer tests (FancyCache). The load times NEVER changed no matter what I did to reduce, eliminate, or buffer disk I/O. So... If someone is telling you it is a HDD bottleneck, it really doesn't seem to be the case.

 

[*]4x120GB SSD drives running in RAID-0

damn that should be fast!!!

[Shaith]

In another thread a week or two ago I did some testing with regards to the load times. Here were my results:

 

System specs:

• Windows 7 64-bit
  
• Intel i7 @ 3.2GHz
  
• 16GB of DDR3 RAM running @ 2000MHz
  
• 4x120GB SSD drives running in RAID-0
  
• 2xATI 4870x2 in SLI
  

 

Loading Times: (used the space bar to skip all cut scenes of the ship flying down)

• Imperial Fleet: 14 seconds
  
• My Ship: 8 seconds
  
• Alderaan: 55 seconds
  
• Balmorra: 32 seconds
  
• Corellia: 58 seconds
  
• Voss (because my alt is there): 35 seconds
  

 

I consider some of these loading times to be annoying at the very least. I couldn't imagine what they're like for people who don't have a beast of a system to run this game.

 

EDIT: Given someone suggested my 2nd generation SSDs aren't fast enough to speed up the load times, I present the following numbers for my RAID-0 setup using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1c:

• Sequential: Read - 687.4 MB/s, Write 258.9 MB/s
  
• Random: Read - 441.9 MB/s, Write 287.7 MB/s
  

 

An interesting addendum to these results is that I was watching disk IO while it was loading Corellia. It very rarely spiked above 10MB/s. This tends to agree with my RAM disk tests and my RAM level 2 cache buffer tests (FancyCache). The load times NEVER changed no matter what I did to reduce, eliminate, or buffer disk I/O. So... If someone is telling you it is a HDD bottleneck, it really doesn't seem to be the case.

 

Interesting - our rigs are similar other than the drive systems. I'm still running spindles rather than SSD's, and have SWTOR installed on a RAID-0 with a pair of 10K Velociraptor 150's, and my load times are pretty close to what yours are.

 

I've also got it loaded on a laptop and I've noticed that my load times vary more from location/connection and less from hardware.

 

I tried the ramdisk bit, it actually made almost no difference in load times, and actually made gameplay in-game choppy.

[Sirsri]

[*]4x120GB SSD drives running in RAID-0

damn that should be fast!!!

 

Depends on the Raid controller. 4 SSD's will saturate most IO systems, even 2 in a raid 0 will. The RAID might also mess up their reads badly so you'd have very bursty IO while it's waiting for the 'other half of the file' sort of thing.

 

 

It seems like there are a lot of different things going on that cause problems. First, yes, the HDD pulling data off is the 'bottleneck' of sorts, once it gets data into ram that's one thing. But the HDD has to find the data it wants in the files, and from the sounds of things the data files they finally settled on aren't being efficiently searched or read from. It's possible it's not reading sequentially from the right place properly.

 

It's also possible that its phoning home when loading, that's potentially sensible as you want to be sure content isn't getting injected while you're loading, but they might be wrongly dumping some files in lieu of others or the like, and then reloading them. In addition to the zone files they have various art assets and so on.

 

 

For point of interest, since the zones in question were brought up.

the SWTOR_en-us_area files

 

Alderaan: 302MB

Balmorra 347

Corellia 328

Voss 323

 

the swtor main_area

 

Alderaan: 183

balmorra 103

corellia 161

Voss 209.

 

Combined:

 

alderaan: 485

balmorra: 450

Corellia 489

Voss: 532

 

 

So it's definitely not a pure throughput problem or they'd all be within 10% of each other. (And any old 7200 RPM drive should be able to move that much data in about 8 seconds).

 

Your own ship and the fleet don't surprise me as being very fast. Your own ship they can basically dump out everything that isn't your gear or your companions, and that's basically the same for the fleet. Your own ship could even be cached all the time even. But none of the 'creatures' and most of the NPC models don't need to stick around.

 

Where I'm guessing they run into issues is internal fragmentation (trying to keep their own memory space clean and juggling things around), network activity to the right places, extracting the right data from the big files 'area_open_worlds" while coping with the fragmentation, a lack of an efficient caching strategy and so on.

 

Most of this could be alleviated if they didn't make you zone every time you died in raids, and let you land directly at the right location (black hole for example) rather than wasting my time going through corellia. Bad design is bad, lack of innovation is bad, and the design should have been done with the technology in mind.

[agrik]

No one cares about load times.

 

I care.

[Finis]

In another thread a week or two ago I did some testing with regards to the load times. Here were my results:

 

System specs:

• Windows 7 64-bit
  
• Intel i7 @ 3.2GHz
  
• 16GB of DDR3 RAM running @ 2000MHz
  
• 4x120GB SSD drives running in RAID-0
  
• 2xATI 4870x2 in SLI
  

 

I am certainly not a hardware guru, so pardon if this is a silly question, I honestly don't know. but isn't the fact that SWTOR is 32 bit vs a 64 limit the amount of RAM it can actively use? My system is not much different from yours, save that I only have 8 gigs of RAM, and I only have regular SATA drives. My load times aren't that much off yours. But it seems to be because of the 32 bit naure of the application, your excess hardware isn't even being used.

 

Again, no computer guru, so I may be way off.

Edited May 16, 2012 by Finis

[ohpleasework]

My understanding is that assets are unpacked in large amounts and loaded into a single cache file, and read from as needed. It's all front loaded during the loading screen. So a faster hard drive (like a SSD) or two disks in a RAID 0 or 1 array will improve write I/O performance greatly, which should reduce the load times of this game.

 

My load times are generally negligible, but there are a few planets that can take up to 30 seconds or longer. At first I thought maybe I had some NTFS or fragmentation issues with the asset files it was extracting into the cache file I mentioned in the previous paragraph. But running defrag followed by a chkdsk didn't help (I had 1% file fragmentation and no errors on the disk to correct, so I guessed incorrectly anyways).

[ohpleasework]

[*]4x120GB SSD drives running in RAID-0

damn that should be fast!!!

 

If he's having performance problems in that setup my guess is his disks are badly aligned, leading to a very high disk queue length in windows. Like, his logical disks (block level) have an allocation of 64 while Windows (byte level/file system) is at 128 or higher. Since his consumer-level array controller won't have advanced components like write-ahead cache, during high write I/O operations the disk becomes too busy to keep up and I/O's are queued, leading to really poor performance.

 

That, or there is a hardware problem or some other fundamental configuration issue at play. Because there is no reason he should be saturating his disk with a 4 spindle SSD RAID 0 array. That thing should be able to perform as a good SQL server with multiple high I/O databases. There's no reason a video game client should be giving him any problems whatsoever.

Edited May 16, 2012 by ohpleasework

[ADPowah]

I did some searching on youtube and watched quite a few people's load screens with different setups. It looked like SSD and higher end rigs moved pretty fast once they got past the initial pause which happens at about 20%.

 

It appears this initial pause (which can take quite a while, sometimes minutes for me) is (as noted above and in more detail in this thread http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=427878) is from "blocked calls". I didn't really know what this was but it was explained above as the data from the server isn't loaded asynchronously, we have to wait for the server and nothing else can load until then.

 

However the period for this "blocked call" issue usually seems to be in the 20-40 second range on most videos I saw. Unfortunately, I am seeing (and I assume others are too) a period greater than this 20-40 seconds. Typically I am in the minute plus range, way worse on particular planets such as Alderaan, Nar Shaddaa, Coriellia.

• Blocked call period begins at 11 secs ends at 45 secs
  
  
• Blocked call period begins at 28 secs ends at 42 secs
  
  

 

I'll try and up load a video of my load screen when I get home for reference.

Edited May 16, 2012 by ADPowah

[Balthazod]

No one cares about load times.

 

You are a person of little perception and even less understanding of the world you live in and the vast majority of SWTOR players. My guess is you are the Creative Director Of BioWare.

 

I care and everyone I know cares.

[Commomp]

I haven't had any problem with load times for my computer since I have SWTOR loaded on a corsair ssd 240gb gt, but a friend of mine always loads in later than i do, and can take up to a minute to 3 minutes at times, but he only has a 5400 rpm drive.

[ohpleasework]

I did some searching on youtube and watched quite a few people's load screens with different setups. It looked like SSD and higher end rigs moved pretty fast once they got past the initial pause which happens at about 20%.

 

It appears this initial pause (which can take quite a while, sometimes minutes for me) is (as noted above and in more detail in this thread http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=427878) is from "blocked calls". I didn't really know what this was but it was explained above as the data from the server isn't loaded asynchronously, we have to wait for the server and nothing else can load until then.

 

However the period for this "blocked call" issue usually seems to be in the 20-40 second range on most videos I saw. Unfortunately, I am seeing (and I assume others are too) a period greater than this 20-40 seconds. Typically I am in the minute plus range, way worse on particular planets such as Alderaan, Nar Shaddaa, Coriellia.

• Blocked call period begins at 11 secs ends at 45 secs
  
  
• Blocked call period begins at 28 secs ends at 42 secs
  
  

 

I'll try and up load a video of my load screen when I get home for reference.

 

That makes a lot of sense. It would explain why a person like me (low-end hard drive, good CPU and lots of RAM with an excellent Internet connection) has low/acceptable load times while some people with extravagant arrays and beastly systems are waiting minutes for a planet to load.