Hang, hang, hang since most recent patch

I fired up the game a couple days ago, after not playing for week or so (busy doing other things), and it told me there was a new patch. So I downloaded and installed it like I would normally do, using the launcher, of course.

The download hung up/stalled just shy of 50% downloaded. After a couple minutes I cancelled and tried it again. And again it got to about the same point and stalled. No biggie, probably network issues somewhere. After a couple more attempts I finally succeeded in downloading the patch.

Then the installation process started ... and hung up/stalled about 50% of the way through. I waited a few minutes before clicking the "Cancel" button and trying again. I repeated this several times. Notably, the launcher/installer would consistently freeze up each after I clicked "Cancel", and I would have to "Force Quit" the application and then relaunch and start all over again. It might also be worth noting that I have the game, all its files, and the launcher installed on an external Firewire drive, but throughout this entire process I did not see any activity (i.e. flashing blue light on the drive enclosure that normally indicates drive activity). I finally just decided to start the install process and go to bed, hoping that it would get past the hangup on its own and the game would be ready to play the next day. Better than sitting and staring at an unmoving progress bar. This "worked".

So now I can play the newly-patched game. I get into the game and load up a character, and she zones into Architect Entertainment, where I had logged her out. She exits through one of the upper doors and flies away, and the whole game freezes up for several seconds. Finally it unfreezes, and she flies forward a few more yards, and everything freezes up again. Then the freezing seems to go away, and she looks in her Contacts and accepts a Tip mission. She flies to the instance, zones in ... and everything freezes up with bare-minimum graphic quality for several seconds before finally returning to normal.

Repeat all this random hanging/freezing on every other character I try, on different servers, with each server showing "Low" or "Medium" population at the times I was trying to play. I'll note that this isn't the normal latency/lag you typically get in Atlas Park when it's crowded. I expect that, and don't worry about it. I'm seeing this in every zone, and even in instances where population isn't normally a problem. Everything will be performing smoothly, and then *BAM!* Hang! Freeze!

I would suspect an issue with my own Internet connection, except I don't have this problem when I'm playing World of Warcraft (though sometimes I think Blizzard has made some kind of deal with Internet Satan, because WoW will continue to plow through even when I can't get my Web browser to connect to any Web sites). And, honestly, I wasn't having this problem with CoH until I installed the latest patch.

Anybody else having performance issues since this latest patch?


Hardware Overview:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

Running Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)

Turn off Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) and Geometry Buffers in the Graphics and Audio settings. Those are the most common suspects for that sort of thing.

Otherwise, the freezes during download/install may mean you have some sort of software conflict going on, or even bad RAM. Try creating a new user and launching CoH with that - if it works more smoothly, you have a software conflict. Bad RAM is the conclusion if it makes no difference.

If you're running on an external drive, then having it go to "sleep" might also interfere in some way. See if completely turning of "going to sleep" on disks makes a difference, I know OSX can do weird things with external disks with it turned on. I've had trouble with a TimeMachine drive. It seems to depend on the brand and model of the disk, among other things.

@CuppaManga - Both of those graphics options were already disabled, as suggested in another thread I read shortly after I started playing back in September. RAM tests show everything OK there. I did try your suggestion of creating a new user account an running only CoH in it, and that showed a big improvement. I still had a few hangs, but they resolved themselves much more quickly than before (2-3 seconds vs. 10-20 seconds), and not completely out of line with what I've dealt with since I first started playing the game. And they're not of the "Freeze, unfreeze, move forward 10 feet, freeze again" variety I was experiencing.

It was just "suspicious" experiencing this abrupt performance degradation after installing the latest patch, not to mention the problems simply downloading and applying the patch.

@RogerWilco - I've kept the "Put drives to sleep" option turned off as long as I've been playing games on Macs (16 years), for exactly this reason. Didn't take me long to get tired of having to wait for the drive to spin up all the time.

If you have antivirus installed, turn it off.

My only antivirus software is ClamXav, and that only runs when I launch it and click the "Start Scan" button.

In any case, I played CoH for several hours yesterday, running under my normal, main user account instead of the special new account I had set up, and everything seemed to be fine. So I guess I'm just going to have to blame "network issues" for the rotten performance the day after I installed the patch.

On a completely unrelated note, when I attempted to take screenshots while running the game under the special new user account, hitting my screenshot key instantly crashed the client. Taking a screenshot worked correctly, however, with the game running under the old "main" user account. Weirdness.

Wanted to post an update on this: I think I found the problem.

I mentioned that I was running CoH from an external drive. I was doing this for two main reasons:

1) The external Firewire drive itself is much faster than my iMac's internal drive

2) I wanted to avoid situations where the game was trying to read from the internal drive at the same time my e-mail client was downloading mail (for example), or during my hourly Time Machine backups (TM backs up my internal drive to yet another external drive)/ The backup process doesn't involve the particular external drive CoH is on.

Anyway, I was poking around my Mac last night doing something entirely unrelated, when I discovered a copy of the CoH app sitting there in my Applications folder on the internal drive. And I noticed the "Last Modified" date on it was Jan. 12, the same day I performed the problematic update I discussed in my original post.

That prompted me to look at the copy of CoH on the external drive — the copy I thought I'd been running all this time (and the only copy I thought I had) — and I saw it hadn't been updated since last October.

So apparently, when I moved the CoH app over to the external drive, along with the NCLauncher app (back in October, apparently), I neglected to delete the original copy from the Applications folder on the internal drive. And ever since then, the NCLauncher has been downloading the intervening patches and applying them to the copy on the internal drive instead of the one on the external drive. And since the copy on the internal drive is apparently the one I've been running all this time, it makes sense that I wasn't seeing the performance improvement I thought I'd get by moving it to the external drive.

Now, why there was such a large, additional performance nosedive after the most recent patch is still a mystery. But in any case, I copied the newer CoH app from the internal drive over to the external drive, made sure I then eradicated it from the internal drive, and finally configured NCLauncher to point to the fresh copy on the external drive.

I've played for several hours since then, and performance has, happily, been nearly flawless.