Re: Diagnosing extreme fps drop
- From: chocolatemalt <me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 22:27:23 -0600
In article <gtsn9g$8gi$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
John Gordon <gordon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Every once in a great while during a raid, I will get a *huge* loss in
fps. My screen will essentially be frozen, with perhaps a frame update
every twenty seconds or so.
It only happens two to three times a month. When it happens, it's nearly
always at the beginning of a 25-man raid boss fight. Sometimes the
situation resolves itself after a minute or two and I can resume playing
(assuming I haven't dies to random AOE/void zones/lightning nova/etc),
and sometimes I end up disconnecting.
It does not seem to be related to another process starting up, like a
virus scanner or disk defragger.
I don't run damage meters.
Any ideas what it might be, and/or anything I can check to determine what
happened, like an event log or something?
It's probably the game loading from disk all kinds of new textures on
all the gear worn by the sudden influx of other players. Do you get the
same effect when entering a BG? Often the cause is low RAM of 1.5 GB or
less, or competition for RAM by other memory hog apps like MS
Word/Excel/etc or a web browser.
Whether that's the issue or not, it's worth setting up Task Manager (I
assume you're running Windows due to the AV & defrag comment) as a
permanent auto-start so that you have a little performance history to
check when the problem happens. Under XP, you'd put a new shortcut in
Start -> All Programs -> Startup, and navigate to
\WINDOWS\system32\taskmgr.exe as the target. I also find it helpful to
improve the taskmgr a bit: In the performance monitor, deselect "always
on top" and select "show kernel times". In the process list, add
columns for "cpu time" and "virtual memory size". Under Vista it's a
little different but the concepts are the same.
When the freeze occurs, alt-tab out to see what the cpu chart shows,
what the current and peak commit size shows in relation to the physical
memory. If you routinely surpass physical with commit, you're thrashing
to disk and need to add RAM. Also check the process list and sort by
cpu time, mem usage, and vm size. This almost always will finger the
guilty party, whether it's WoW itself in a funk, a sound driver going
haywire or just Firefox doing another massive memory leak and competing
with WoW. Also don't be surprised if Microsoft is to blame with
msmpeng.exe -- you may need to fiddle its config. Let us know what you
find!
.
- References:
- Diagnosing extreme fps drop
- From: John Gordon
- Diagnosing extreme fps drop
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