Improving Load Times

[V-Serp]

As others have mentioned, I too have an SSD and certain planets, notably Nar Shadda, Alderaan and Corelia take too long to load. Fleet, your ship and WZs all load quick, but those 3 planets especially are bad and you likely won't want to load too much.

 

It's not a big deal if you're just doing PVE, you load the planet once and you just play the game. But if you are playing warzones it can be very frustrating, so this is another reason why most people just PVE up to 50 and then sit in Fleet all day waiting for wz pops.

[Neomale]

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.

 

Nice specs but if you have a bad internet connection then your loadtimes will be bad. Can't tell if it's your internet cos you didn't say which type of internet you have.

 

Fact is a guildie of mine who has the same internet connection as mine but has SSD in his computer (my overall specs are way better then him but I have no SSD) and his loading times are about 1/3 of mine so for me it's proof that SSDs DO speed up loading times.

Edited May 16, 2012 by Neomale
typo

[Sirsri]

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.

 

 

The problem with doing it non blocking is that you'd have to dump loaded data and restart if the call returns a result you don't like, and they *may* have determined that happens often enough it's not worth doing. Broadly speaking, yes, they should be pre-fetching a lot of data, and loading a lot of stuff while they wait, but it's possible the client doesn't know what to load until it hears from the server, or they have a problem of loading data into the right places within memory (remember it needs to get into 'ram' and 'video ram', some things both, some things only one and so on. This is tricky because you can see from the numbers I posted that they could easily be running into total memory limits, and they need to pull out pieces of files, which is what they're waiting for.

 

Oldschool MMO's (think EQ) you used to have 'global' memory, this was basically character armours, all of your transformations/illusion spells, those were always resident in memory, so anything else you had (the specific level data) needed to be loaded around that. WoW does a streaming thing, where basically it constantly grabs data and feeds it into the video card, assuming you never have more than say 100 characters on screen (including NPC's) and never more than 20 buildings you can do this by pulling all of that data out of the files in real time, or sort of real time if your computer is slow and you watch all this stuff forming as it happens. How SWTOR does it I'm not sure, but it looks like there's far more art data than they can reasonably fit in memory in full blobs (the .tor files in your 'assets' directory. I see about 300MB of 'global' GFX and "global_1.tor" but god knows how much of that crap all gets loaded at once. I probably could figure it out, but BioWare doesn't pay me, and I have no desire to do their job for free, I've given them enough free advice I'd have charged anyone else a few thousand dollars for I have no reason to do actual work.

 

If you look at just the cape, chest, chest_tight, hand head lower (leg?) and 'mags' (no idea what that's short for, but I'm guessing it's feet /bracers) they have 2.58 GB of art files. Which would break on most 32 bit computers, and cause a fair bit of chaos on machines with only 4GB of RAM. So they have to be reaching into those files and deciding what to pull out, which might legitimately be a server call (especially when you add in everything else in a level not just character armours).

 

The problem might be that they've got something wrong with the way the lists are being returned from planets like corellia etc. Those could be very large (that would be mind numbingly stupid but stranger things have happened), or they could get rebuilt every time someone zones in (again, potentially mind numbingly stupid, and that would be a nightmare on server performance), or there's some specific thing causing them to have errors and take a while to correct themselves.

[ADPowah]

/le snip

Well I'm not trying to convince them to rework their system, what i am trying to accomplish is get my "blocked call period" down to the 20-40 seconds I am seeing in the videos. Is this just an internet connection issue?

[Sirsri]

Well I'm not trying to convince them to rework their system, what i am trying to accomplish is get my "blocked call period" down to the 20-40 seconds I am seeing in the videos. Is this just an internet connection issue?

 

 

Since the same basic effect (significantly longer load times on particular planets) happens to everyone, it's not your issue directly.

 

Different people will notice it to varying degrees (I would think people right near the 4 physical sites, fairfax, san fran, and dublin, and wherever they have the oceania centre is will experience the least problems, but hard to say).

 

If you'd done all the standard stuff then sure, it could theoretically be a networking issue, and I'd try a speedtest to a server near one of those locales, whichever cluster you play on. But I would expect this is a matter of waiting for EA-BioWare/Simutronics to re-engineer a chunk of their software (and god help them if the problem is poorly chosen file formats).

 

It might be worth trying a character on a server on a different cluster and compare your load times to that server, although you might have crappy data on just the starter worlds.

[FuulishOne]

Anyone notice if this is a relatively new condition post like 1.2.1 or so? It seems to have gotten worse ever since the "crash to desktop" issues started occuring to folks.

[RonaiSanzer]

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.

 

don't tell people to toss money out of the window. many more people have a regular hard disk and still load in a timely manner.