Naxxramas optimization
by Adam Holisky 
Feb 3rd 2009 at 11:30AM
Crygil posted an important announcement last night concerning the lag and associated performance issues in Naxxramas. Blizzard has made some recent optimizations to Naxx, and they want to know what all of our experiences are like in the instance this week. As such, they're asking everyone to post feedback in terms of performance in the thread over on the official forums.Now by performance I don't think they mean "My pocket Paladin can't tank."
What they're looking for are detailed reports such as "When I was attempting to do the Heigan dance, my entire group lagged behind a good 5 to 10 seconds. We decided to go and raid Hogger after we wiped for six hours in a row." Or "The Ice Block appeared after Frost Breath when my guild was taking down Sapphiron because of the 30 second lag."
Matt Rossi wrote a great piece yesterday on the need for designing the fights around latency. Hopefully this will become less of an issue as Blizzard works out their backend mechanics; and it appears this change is a major step forward.
Filed under: Realm News, News items, Raiding
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Boko Feb 3rd 2009 11:44AM
Is Sapph still broken? His aura was hitting in an unusual manner last week.
Adam Holisky Feb 3rd 2009 11:50AM
We've had some reports come in that it's still broke, but there's nothing solid and I haven't done the encounter yet this week myself.
anathematize Feb 3rd 2009 11:58AM
saph aura seemed weird last night... but nothing more than "feeling" to go on.
skreeran Feb 3rd 2009 12:17PM
More than a feeeelane! (quiet voice: More than a feelin'!)
peagle Feb 3rd 2009 11:55AM
You are a failure on so many levels I am tempted to make a pie-chart.
Regards the Naxx fixes, speaking from personal experience, we transferred off server long ago to solve this problem. Given it's existed since the launch, I find this resolution much too late in announcement or effect.
peagle Feb 3rd 2009 1:46PM
Hmm, they deleted the "first" post I was replying to (which I applaud), however now I look like I'm responding to the writer in my first line, I'm not
Mike Feb 4th 2009 4:33AM
Just for the niceness of your retort, they should have left the idiot second "first" poster remain, as a shining example of the prowess of dimwits with an internet account.
Macbook Feb 3rd 2009 11:58AM
IMO the lag issues have come a long way. Naxx is nowhere near as bad (lag-wise), as it used to be.
I hope it only gets better :)
Macbook, http://Moonkin.info
Eternauta Feb 3rd 2009 1:40PM
Please people, stop downrating this guy just because he post his website.
Is it so offensive to you?
I'd rather downrate the lots of "FIRST!!11!lulz" that appear everyday.
antiwow.com Feb 3rd 2009 11:59AM
Do we even know how these instances work? Do they run on separate servers?
I mean, it looks to me it's a problem with ram/cpu on the serverside because it has so many open instances at the same time (max even).
The lag isnt latency lag for sure, latency is always fine.
mike Feb 3rd 2009 12:32PM
I think the problems we've been experiencing are a combination of the two. My guild is on an East Coast server and we have several members that live in Korea. Heigan dance can be a bit of a pain. They have learned to run ahead of the rest of the group (on their clients), while we still see them running with the group. This is latency.
Matt Rossi's "designing around latency" article yesterday touched on this as well. He noted that trying to do the Heigan dance with 1800ms latency is an exercise in futility.
I'm sure server lag causes some problems as well, but I haven't experienced these in Naxx. I see this kind of lag when it takes a few seconds to loot a corpse, pop a dialog box with an NPC, open the mailbox, etc.
kerrizor Feb 3rd 2009 1:26PM
They're run on some of the faster "super computers" in the world -- there was an annual "Top Ten Fastest Computers" article recently, and Blizz owns like 4 of the top ten..
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/technology/business-computing/18super.html
IIRC, instance servers are indeed separate from the realm servers, but are deployed with the battlegroup; everyone from the same battlegroup is sharing the same instance servers.
JDM Feb 3rd 2009 3:40PM
@Mike:
As a rule of thumb on Heigan: If you are running WITH the group, you're too far behind. You should always appear to be leading the group when Heigan dancing.
While I'm personally always in front of the pack I don't look at the players for reference, I watch the edges of the splashes/safe zone to know where to move to next. I've never once died to Heigan splashes, but several of our group have. Most of those players have computers with poor framerates in Naxx, though.
For a while the servers were really bad with latency on their end, but for whatever reason, it did not bother our raid much, other than being annoying with random action pauses. We had no more wiping issues than normal.
These days, the "Naxx server" (whatever it happens to be, perhaps merely a process) has been completely fine, absolutely no server-side lag.
sephirah Feb 3rd 2009 12:02PM
Why I'm scared by the NEW bugs they'll introduce.
Sorry Blizz, but since 3.0 your quality is getting quite low...
outlier Feb 3rd 2009 12:06PM
late at night and especially on weekends, entering instances often times results in the error message "Instance Server is full, no more instances may be launched" or something of the like. Personally, i think this is a result of groups forming together to get the achievement for instance elders but you would still think that blizzard would prepare for this. Anyone know if the valentines event has something similar that will lead to inconvenience to us who couldn't care less about holiday achievements?
Corazu Feb 3rd 2009 12:25PM
I don't know about you, but this is standard behaviour since WoTLK hit on our server - though, so are 40-60 minute queues...
Hurray for Skullcrasher :/
AyaJulia Feb 3rd 2009 12:11PM
Am I the only one who's never had any issue with Naxx before? Ever? I don't get weird lag, Saph's aura is normal.... Yet I've never seen aaaaaaanyone else say "no, it hasn't been a problem." I'm not absurdly close to my server geographically or anything, either. ^^;
vexis58 Feb 3rd 2009 1:01PM
I don't usually have too many problems with lag either, and most of the time I do, I usually blame the people in my house who like to download anime over BitTorrent while I'm raiding. Grr.
Nostraphex Feb 3rd 2009 1:31PM
Some of the lag issues that was plaguing a lot of people was also based around a few battlegroups, so not everybody was experiencing them. That led to a lot of people saying to other people that it was their ISP because they didn't have any problem, and since Blizz didn't really respond until very late in the process, things got muddled
Nodaba Feb 3rd 2009 1:33PM
I've never had any crazy lag in instances, either. Dalaran the past two weeks has been weird (5-10 seconds to opne a trade window, move stuff to the back, etc.), but instances (including Naxx) are and have always been just fine.
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