Slow zoning: Network or disk issue?

Lately I've been noticing I have rather long zone times. Sometimes long enough that people who haven't hit the mission door yet are waiting for me when I get into a mission.

Current 2 drives are:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136283
Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Primary drive is doing service for OS and paging. CoH Resides on this drive.
Secondary drive is doing service for MS SQL Server.
Even shutting down SQL doesn't alleviate the long loads.

Internet connection is AT&T DSL 6.0 Mbps/768 Kbps

Network connection:

Computer: Gigabit
Router: Gigabit
DSL Gateway: *Unsure* Probably 10 MBit.


I am not at the computer currently so I can't provide a CoH Helper or HijackThis (But I will later if necessary.)

Just looking for opinions on this and whether I might see a load speed improvement by getting an SSD and using it for CoH.

Note: Game performance, otherwise, is just fine. Just the zone loads are unconscionably slow. This happens on pretty much every server, regardless (Freedom, Protector, Champion, Justice, etc).

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I'd tend to blame disk, but I might be wrong. How much memory does your machine have?

In my experience, any of slow hard drives, slow/spotty network or insufficient memory will lead to slow zoning. However, the symptoms are usually different.

If you have low memory, you should be able to see it in your Task Manager. You may also hear your hard drives thrashing, depending on how noisy they are in normal use. If your game is on the same disk as your swap file, this will make the game extra slow to load as your drive heads have to keep changing between streaming in the game's PIGG files and accessing the system swap file. Your zone loading progress bar progress will move in fits and starts, especially for heavily loaded zones like Grandville.

If you have slow network, but decent hard drives and enough memory, you tend to see your zone load bar take a long time to start, or even a long time to appear after the game splash screen. It may have some fits and starts once it gets going, but usually it will be smooth and fast if beyond about 25-33% progress if the problem was network related. Sometimes if your network is being really shoddy, particularly with a lot of packet loss, you will "hang" while zoning. Your progress bar will never appear, never start, or stop usually somewhere in the 1st third of its length and never move again, forcing you to kill the game client.

If you have slow hard drives but OK network and enough RAM, usually you just have slow progress at all stages of the zoning bar. This can be a little hard to tell from the other two symptoms, but generally, I describe it as the bar seeming less random in how it progresses. It may stop for annoyingly long times and then start again, but it will always tend to do this in about the same places along its length, and it will tend to (usually) take about the same time for the same zone. Unfortunately, having a slow CPU seems to have a similar "look and feel", but you can usually tell if that's underpowered in other parts of the game and not just on the load screens.

If you have a mix of these problems, they're going to be harder to identify.

Edit: Looking at the specs you had available, I'm going to take a wild guess at it being memory-related, especially if the SQL Server instance is running. That depends on how much RAM you have, though. If you have enough free RAM for both CoH and any DB instances to be resident (or if you shut down the DBs when you play) then I'm not sure. CPU horsepower might be at fault, depending on spec, or maybe network depending on congestion. (You might not be getting what you're rated at for network speed, and if not that can depend on a lot of external factors.)

If you have less than 2GB RAM, that would be the first thing I'd fix.

In my experience, assuming you have 2GB of Memory and a 2+ GHz Core2Duo CPU (or equivalent/better), Zoning speed is largely based on the I/O speed of your hard drive.

When I upgraded from a single drive to a 4-drive RAID-5 array running on a 3ware 9650SE RAID Controller card with a 256 MB cache, I found that I zoned much, much, MUCH faster.

So, upgrading the drive that your CoH sits on to a SATA-II Solid State Drive (SSD) with a 270+MB/sec read rate (most new ones have this) will result in MUCH faster zoning as compared to a conventional spinning-platter hard drive.

-- Vivian

One thing the others didn't mention - the Red Names have stated that once the loading bar starts moving, it's pretty much all your machine