Teleporting people and flying cars causing a real headache.

[SugarD]

A slow upload speed won't make you get high ping, never ever. If you have ADSL it's meant you can get a high download speed but they can't offer a really good upload speed.

If you have fibre as I have they can offer the same upload/download. Currently I have the Swedish ISP Telia Sonera 10/10. Though gonna change to Sweden's best soon and have 100/100 net.
Or I could order 1000/1000 net in my apartment in the city

Actually having a bad upload speed can effect your ping. Upload speed is how fast you upload data back to the server, which is what it needs to not only receive your ping, but receive any data about where you are on the server and your actions, which it then uploads other user data back to you and you download it. Both speeds can and will affect your ping. Distance is also a big factor for pings, but this can be combated more with better internet service.

[Murt]

Distance is one thing and what kind of ISP you have really, my regular ping to all of Argonath servers are 30-35. Yes of course it can affect your ping, but not that much.

If you now would use your upload speed by uploading a screenshot on a mirror for example imageshack your ping would drastically raise due to the low upload speed. I can easily upload 1.1 megabyte per second and I never experience any lag if I even stream a full HD movie (1080p) or anything.

God bless fibre 

[SugarD]

Distance is one thing and what kind of ISP you have really, my regular ping to all of Argonath servers are 30-35. Yes of course it can affect your ping, but not that much.

If you now would use your upload speed by uploading a screenshot on a mirror for example imageshack your ping would drastically raise due to the low upload speed. I can easily upload 1.1 megabyte per second and I never experience any lag if I even stream a full HD movie (1080p) or anything.

God bless fibre 

Well FiOs, if not limited by equipment or the ISP, can go at the speed of light down that cable, so technically speaking most users with FiOs have no reason to complain about their pings hahaha...

[Frank_Hawk]

He's saying it's not network lag on the server's end because the network usage isn't jumping around or spiking. It's staying about the same as always.

Please explain in layman's terms.

I'm sure everybody will agree that tonight's lag was one of the worst we've ever experienced. I had planes landing on my head, ballas being thrown into me, cars with no drivers magically chasing me, flying carpets, random explosions and a unkillable grove. The question I now ask, is whether you all are experiencing the same? Please share your experiences.

[Dabbs]

I lag sometimes, I even freeze for a few seconds at a time, But i think its more of my computer being slow, then it is internet lag.
But when i do notice lag on the server, its from the chat/commands, yesterday i was even lagging off of a plane during a planesurf event

[SugarD]

Please explain in layman's terms.

I'm sure everybody will agree that tonight's lag was one of the worst we've ever experienced. I had planes landing on my head, ballas being thrown into me, cars with no drivers magically chasing me, flying carpets, random explosions and a unkillable grove. The question I now ask, is whether you all are experiencing the same? Please share your experiences.

In layman's terms, he says blame your internet connection, cuz the server isn't lagging on his end.

[Matthew_Green]

On my end, a police car slammed into a utility pole during a pursuit about 1/2 mile from my house 2 days ago. Only in Campbell Co., Tennessee...

[Jamba]

Ever since I registered in the server I experience normal lag due to the distance. But it was tolerable lag, but now it is almost impossible to play, at least as a Law enforcer role where you have to shoot some people. Driving through Pershing into Idlewood is a Destruction Derby with no prize. Hopefully these unsuccessful DDos attacks cease.

[Frank_Hawk]

In layman's terms, he says blame your internet connection, cuz the server isn't lagging on his end.

I have a 8MB download, 1MB upload and a ping of 37ms. I'm sure this is aquadate to meet compatibility requirements here. Excluding these hacking attacks, I think the problem stems outside of this. As Conroy mentioned and I'm sure xcasio can shed light on this - the configuration of scripts are long winded bearing illogical loops and routes. Surely this ties into having a demonstratable effect on command lines such as /enter and having to wait 5 second until they execute? To verify whether the problem is isolated to the Argonath SA:MP server, I visited other servers to find there were no problems whatsoever in regards to lag and desync.

[SugarD]

I have a 8MB download, 1MB upload and a ping of 37ms. I'm sure this is aquadate to meet compatibility requirements here. Excluding these hacking attacks, I think the problem stems outside of this. As Conroy mentioned and I'm sure xcasio can shed light on this - the configuration of scripts are long winded bearing illogical loops and routes. Surely this ties into having a demonstratable effect on command lines such as /enter and having to wait 5 second until they execute? To verify whether the problem is isolated to the Argonath SA:MP server, I visited other servers to find there were no problems whatsoever in regards to lag and desync.

Yes, your upload is decent, and your download is pretty good, hence the awesome ping. As far as scripting goes, the 5 second delay after using /enter is actually so a user's computer has a chance to load the environment because you are entering another virtual world where the interiors are floating in the sky, and this is a feature in the multiplayer mod itself, not the singleplayer game, so it takes time to load because it's streaming and modifying the game's memory on the fly. Long story short, since SA:MP streams objects instead of pre-downloading everything like MTA:SA, things like this won't load instantly, in some cases, where they would in others.

[valmiustila]

Impossible to pursuit someone, get carkilled even tho person wont do that on purpose.. From Finland. Also, if i enter to area, where is multiple vehicles, I'll have about 0,3sec freeze when cars are "spawning" to cardealer/PD etc..

[Gandalf]

I have a 8MB download, 1MB upload and a ping of 37ms. I'm sure this is aquadate to meet compatibility requirements here. Excluding these hacking attacks, I think the problem stems outside of this. As Conroy mentioned and I'm sure xcasio can shed light on this - the configuration of scripts are long winded bearing illogical loops and routes. Surely this ties into having a demonstratable effect on command lines such as /enter and having to wait 5 second until they execute? To verify whether the problem is isolated to the Argonath SA:MP server, I visited other servers to find there were no problems whatsoever in regards to lag and desync.

Do not try to undermine the server by blaming the scripters. Once the current row of attacks is over we will see if there still is reason to research in optimizing lag.

Yrsyerday we have all day the spiked network performance. Today in the morning similar. We have switched off ALL network services to ensure that there is nothing on our end, and checked the firewall settings. With all our services off and no other IP connecting as ours.. the spiked network load is still there varying from 0,1 (as it should be) to 8%. We are looking in to this with the data center.
Further more yesterday we receved 4 times a message from the hardware firewall stopping a DDOS attack. Both things are causing more problem than any of the scripts.
As for blaming xcasio and/or other scripter for illogical work, please become a scripter yourself and show a better job before putting any blame on others.

Now for the laoding. Have you ever noticed that in single player you see your character walking in to a door, then entering ? That is a 3-second animation to allow loading the objects in a virtual world.
When we started creating our own virtual interiors, we had the problem that people fell out if the objects were not loaded. We found (as forst on SA:MP) that the reason was the working of GTA:SA and applied the same way, however as there are no animation sequences to be reached we can not hide the trick like single player does.
You will not find this feature on servers that use only single-layers interiors (as they are loaded faster) or have a low real player count, as objects are loading fast with a low amount of players.

Another tip especially for you. The server syncs movements of players, and detects if there is a collision, If two players are in the same spot, this causes a logical collision in the server math, which in effect causes lag. This is why when there are large groups of players who either use several animations that move them in to one spot, or who all attempt to run in to and hit each other, this causes local lag.
In SA:MP 0.3 instead of these collisions causing a crash as happened frequently in SA:MP 0.2b, the server desyncs the players so they are no longer at the same spot.
As you are part of a group who likes to run in to each other, hit and use walking animations in one spot, you will experience more lag and desync as others.

So before blaming scripters or server, better study the dynamics of scripts and issues of game servers.

[Rick.]

Do not try to undermine the server by blaming the scripters. Once the current row of attacks is over we will see if there still is reason to research in optimizing lag.

Yrsyerday we have all day the spiked network performance. Today in the morning similar. We have switched off ALL network services to ensure that there is nothing on our end, and checked the firewall settings. With all our services off and no other IP connecting as ours.. the spiked network load is still there varying from 0,1 (as it should be) to 8%. We are looking in to this with the data center.
Further more yesterday we receved 4 times a message from the hardware firewall stopping a DDOS attack. Both things are causing more problem than any of the scripts.
As for blaming xcasio and/or other scripter for illogical work, please become a scripter yourself and show a better job before putting any blame on others.

Now for the laoding. Have you ever noticed that in single player you see your character walking in to a door, then entering ? That is a 3-second animation to allow loading the objects in a virtual world.
When we started creating our own virtual interiors, we had the problem that people fell out if the objects were not loaded. We found (as forst on SA:MP) that the reason was the working of GTA:SA and applied the same way, however as there are no animation sequences to be reached we can not hide the trick like single player does.
You will not find this feature on servers that use only single-layers interiors (as they are loaded faster) or have a low real player count, as objects are loading fast with a low amount of players.

Another tip especially for you. The server syncs movements of players, and detects if there is a collision, If two players are in the same spot, this causes a logical collision in the server math, which in effect causes lag. This is why when there are large groups of players who either use several animations that move them in to one spot, or who all attempt to run in to and hit each other, this causes local lag.
In SA:MP 0.3 instead of these collisions causing a crash as happened frequently in SA:MP 0.2b, the server desyncs the players so they are no longer at the same spot.
As you are part of a group who likes to run in to each other, hit and use walking animations in one spot, you will experience more lag and desync as others.

So before blaming scripters or server, better study the dynamics of scripts and issues of game servers.

Damn. I'm puzzled.

[Frank_Hawk]

To be clear, there is no blame game involving the scripters. For the last two years we've intermittently suffered from lag / desync from different sources. In the last year, xcasio and me sat down on MSN to discuss how we could resolve the recurring lag / desync which had similarities to what we are experiencing today. I relied on xcasio's judgement of valuating the scripts and deciding the best course of action. He came to the conclusion that lag was exacerbated by lines of code which were not needed and could be overcome by streamlining them. The decision was then taken to identify areas of code which could be streamlined and xcasio generously spent countless hours modifying areas considered as high priority. As a result of his hard work, lag was reduced significantly. This was further complemented by actions of your own as you may remember in the past involving server configuration adjustments.

In relations to spiked network performance, I'm not in a position to review the analytics and if I was - I wouldn't understand it anyway being a single player balla  These illegal DDOS attacks are despicable but will/has any action been taken to bring the perpetrator into the open? If we are thinking along the same lines, a report would have been filed with his ISP and unless they are absolutely useless themselves they would have already disabled his connection based on evidence.

As for animation loading time, I can see the background to your case. Though, when visiting other servers they seem to load instantly. This includes animations such as walking through doors, /gsign and many more. Are they using a different modelling system to ours? If so, perhaps there is a template used universally across SA:MP servers to support the same format of execution?

In regards to syncing player movements - I've experienced no problems whatsoever when syncing animations at the same time alongside several other players in the not too distant past. During events such as the INFERNO 9 Royal Rumble, players were instructed to use animations such as /hail, /gsign and more - but these did not result in players hovering around the screen as seen today. The destruction derby event could also be used as a supporting example to this.

To summarise, I personally don't know what the problem is because I'm not a scripter, have access to server analytics or have the technical know-how to understand. I'm speculating on what we could check based on past experiences, what the cause could be and how we go forward in resolving the issue. I hope we will be in a better position to evaluate how to progress once these grove street homies decide to stop the fanatical DDOS assault.

[Gandalf]

As you have noticed, xcasio and other scripters have spent a lot of time in trying to optimize the scripts, and currently there is continuous wourk going on. Also one of the reaons we want to strar a new "blank" game mode is to avoid old junk disturbing the current procedures.

As for all other things, the first thing is to get back to a normalized situation. If under normal traffic circumstances desync and lag are still existing at unacceptable levels, it will be clear that we will continue to examine possible causes.

As already mentioned with respect to other servers, the player count and behaviour does influence the reaction of scripts. If you will play during EU morning times when the server has around 30 players, I doubt you will find any problem. This does not mean we should not attemmpt to improve, however as we have noticed during test sessions, scripts that work perfect wth 20 players will not work on a crowded server. The parade at the 5-year celebration is a prime example, it was tested and worked without any glitch on the test server, however on a server with 150 players the NPC refused to load.

Please note that our server hardware has reserve in both processor capacity and memory, meaning that the hardware is not compromising the performance. We have reduced disk activity to increase performance, and will reduce it further. The main problem comes from either bandwith, which under stable conditions it at 12.5%, or server performance. As for the last note that we have no ping kicker or AFK kicker in action, though both could actually increase performance. AS RP server we feel that shooting is a secondary tool so server does not have to be optimized for fighting conditions like a DM server.