Why does it take LOTRO almost five minutes to load? I thought it might have been a problem with my video card, but I just had the manufacturer replace my video card because it was overheating. This extremely slow loading only seems to have started after the last major update. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions for correction?
I think I had these looong loading times problems even before I just too had to replace my faulty graphics adapter =)
Havent clocked it but does not propably take 5 mins in here though.
Im running defrag frequently etc, I just guess that this is just one of the weird issues happening.. When ever they atleast try to fix something, they broke 10 other things ;-D
Dell Studio XPS 8100. Intel Core i5-650 processor (4MB Cache, 3.20GHz)
8GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1.333MHz-4x2GB
Windows 7 Home Premium SP 1 with latest updates (6/15/12)
Video Card: nVidia GeForce GTS 240 1024 MB GDDR3 (Replaced by Dell 7/10/12)
Driver Version: 8.17.13.142 (5/15/12)
Audio: Realtek High Definition Audio
Audio Driver: 6.0.1.6235 (11/2/10 latest available)
My Internet connection is via a DSL Modem (top speed offered by my ISP)
I noticed in another thread that the number of characters and their level might impact loading time. I have nine L75s all max'd in crafting.
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You didnt show your HDD (Hard Drive Disk). Seeing that you have a Laptop you most likely have a 5400RPM HDD which impacts the most of your performance. I would get a SSD when you can for max performance of your laptop also at the bottom of you laptop goto the battery logo and click on it and make sure your laptop mode is set to high performance. The many level 75s you have does impact at the loging in the client but does not impact or has no impact on the logging in once you have loaded all of the characters you have. At that point it only loads the character you choose to enter the world with. I hope this helps you.
long load times are down to how many quests/deeds your character has done and where you logged out. The game servers have to send all quest/deed data to your game client on loading and to load all the graphics/audio for the given area.
Also it makes a big difference on where you logout from, e.g. Lagtrev aka Galtrev best not to log out there in or near the craft hall. Move to a quiet area, personally I logout if I need to in Galtrev at either of the gates
As Ph0enix said your hard drive is most likely the cause of the long loading screens.
Make sure you have set up the laptop for the best performance (preferably) or on balanced. Also you should play with your charger plugged in as this will give you better performance as well.
After I changed my HDD to SSD, my loading screens decreased by around 80% so if you have some spare money it would be a nice investment for you to get one of the SSDs (i would recommend 128GB or higher as 64GB could be too small for most people).
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Why do you always try to find problems on user's end?
I've been experiencing a bit longer loading times lately. Instead of usual 20-30seconds from character selection screen to ingame, I am seeing up to one minute loading times. Nothing changed on my end. I suspect server hamsters weren't being fed properly lately.
Many philosophical problems are caused by such things as the simple inability to shut up.
Why do you always try to find problems on user's end?
I've been experiencing a bit longer loading times lately. Instead of usual 20-30seconds from character selection screen to ingame, I am seeing up to one minute loading times. Nothing changed on my end. I suspect server hamsters weren't being fed properly lately.
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Not to make enemys on this thread but the client does have to load all information for your characters and the last place you logged out of the game. That said I see that he has a laptop and knowing laptop HDDs manly the ones that are 5400RPM slow down a lot when you start filling them up with data, Pictures, and video. The reason this is due to the very small amount of cache the HDD 5400RPM has. The cache is the spot that writes down where everything is on the HDD so the OS can find it easier. The main reason I have blamed the HDD in his or her laptop is due to the fact that I still have less than 20secs of log in time on my desktop. And I have notice that most of the people that have this problem have a slow computer and/or internet.
Dude no offence, but could you format your replies like a human? Or rather, not use any formatting at all? I was staring at your post, borderline epilepsy attack from the colours, not being able to tell whether I was looking at signature or not.
P.S. Cache size has nothing to do with loading speed (unless we're talking about millions of small files for example). It's the - surprise - rotation speed.
Many philosophical problems are caused by such things as the simple inability to shut up.
long load times are dependant on a lot of things however, here a a few things to consider
1. generaly the higher the character the longer the load time. this is a factor caused by a lot of variables mostly the gear/skills/items that a level 75 character has/owns as an experement i dumped a major portion of one of my capped characters into my housing chests and then logged completely out then back in and suprise i loaded faster. It is measurable make a new character log out then log back in it takes very little time. so level stuf is one cause as very little of our characters is stored on our machines and most of wht is is loaded.verified when we load our characters.
2. location is a big thing too logging out in the middle of nowhere i log in faster then if i log out in lagtrev(galtrev) as the more that has to be rendered the longer it takes to load me in
3. true updload/download connection speed this is affected by bandwidth and time of day
4. time of day depending on the location of the majority of the players are living in lets say west coast of the US as an example ) if it was prime time for that server the more people logging in and or playing makes for more server demand higher demand on the server means lower thruput ie it will take far longer to log in at a busy time then when most are in bed.
5.this ones a bit wierd but try it next time you log out before you do mute your in game sounds in the contrrol panel. I can attest personally that this does speed up getting into the game.
6. your computer depending on so many variables is silly but bus speed amount of memory procesor speed graphics card memory etc all play into "thinking" time taken while your computer crunches on stuff at the load screen. defragging and clearing cache and hard drive speed memory speeded are all factors.
Last edited by Vandellia; Jul 16 2012 at 09:07 AM.
Dude no offence, but could you format your replies like a human? Or rather, not use any formatting at all? I was staring at your post, borderline epilepsy attack from the colours, not being able to tell whether I was looking at signature or not.
P.S. Cache size has nothing to do with loading speed (unless we're talking about millions of small files for example). It's the - surprise - rotation speed.
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If the color bothers you, you can change your background color. I am not changing something for one player and cache is very important for a low RPM HDD which by the way is what we have been talking about ( His HDD is 5400RPM ). What ever his problem is we are posting to help him not bicker like children back and forth. And if you are fighting this due to the slow loading time you are having I suggest buy a SSD then you will see a 80% boost in your speed. Try telling me that a new laptop doesn't run better or faster than the same laptop but with lots of data on it. Even when its DeFraged to 0%. RPM doesn't lower over time. cache does because you are filling it.
Let me give you some info on what RPM (Revolutions per minute) is and what cache is.
RPM
RPM is used to help determine the access time on computer hard drives. RPM is a measurement of how many complete revolutions a computer's hard drive makes in a single minute. The higher the RPM, the faster the data will be accessed; for example, if you were comparing two hard drives, one with 5400 RPM and another with 7200 RPM, the hard drive with a 7200 RPM will be capable of accessing data much faster than the 5400 RPM drive. However, it is also important to note that a 5400 RPM drive will be much cheaper than a 7200 RPM drive.
While it may not be a noticeable speed difference when loading small files, the RPM of a hard drive can make a dramatic difference when loading large files or several hundred or thousand files. We always recommend users get at least a 7200 RPM drive.
RPM can also refer to the revolutions per minute a computer case fan or heatsink fan spins at. With a high RPM, the fan will move more air or remove more heat from the computer or processor. However, as you increase the RPM of a fan, you will also notice an increase in noise or decibel (dBa).
Cache
In computer storage, disk buffer (often ambiguously[citation needed] called disk cache or cache buffer[citation needed]) is the embedded memory in a hard drive acting as a buffer between the rest of the computer and the physical hard disk platter that is used for storage. Modern hard disks come with 8 to 64 MiB of such memory.
Since the late 1980s, nearly all disks sold have embedded microcontrollers and either an ATA, Serial ATA, SCSI, or Fibre Channel interface. The drive circuitry usually has a small amount of memory, used to store the bits going to and coming from the disk platter.
The disk buffer is physically distinct from and is used differently than the page cache typically kept by the operating system in the computer's main memory. The disk buffer is controlled by the microcontroller in the hard disk drive, and the page cache is controlled by the computer to which that disk is attached. The disk buffer is usually quite small, from 8 to 64 MiB, and the page cache is generally all unused physical memory. While data in the page cache is reused multiple times, the data in the disk buffer is rarely reused.[citation needed] In this sense, the terms disk cache and cache buffer are misnomers; the embedded controller's memory is more appropriately called the disk buffer.
Note that disk array controllers, as opposed to disk controllers, usually have normal cache memory of around 0.5–8 GiB.
Read-ahead/read-behind
When executing a read from the disk, the disk arm moves the read/write head to (or near) the correct track, and after some settling time the read head begins to pick up bits. Usually, the first sectors to be read are not the ones that have been requested by the operating system. The disk's embedded computer typically saves these unrequested sectors in the disk buffer, in case the operating system requests them later.
Speed matching
The speed of the disk's I/O interface to the computer almost never matches the speed at which the bits are transferred to and from the hard disk platter. The disk buffer is used so that both the I/O interface and the disk read/write head can operate at full speed.
Write acceleration
The disk's embedded microcontroller may signal the main computer that a disk write is complete immediately after receiving the write data, before the data are actually written to the platter. This early signal allows the main computer to continue working even though the data has not actually been written yet. This can be somewhat dangerous, because if power is lost before the data are permanently fixed in the magnetic media, the data will be lost from the disk buffer, and the file system on the disk may be left in an inconsistent state. On some disks, this vulnerable period between signaling the write complete and fixing the data can be arbitrarily long, as the write can be deferred indefinitely by newly arriving requests. For this reason, the use of write acceleration can be controversial. Consistency can be maintained, however, by using a battery-backed memory system for caching data — although this is typically only found in high end RAID controllers. Alternatively, the caching can simply be turned off when the integrity of data is deemed more important than write performance. Another option is to send data to disk in a carefully managed order and to issue "cache flush" commands in the right places, like the ZFS file system does.
Command queuing
Newer SATA and most SCSI disks can accept multiple commands while any one command is in operation through "command queuing" (see NCQ and TCQ). These commands are stored by the disk's embedded controller until they are completed. Should a read reference the data at the destination of a queued write, the to-be-written data will be returned. Command queuing is different from write acceleration in that the main computer's operating system is notified when data is actually written onto the magnetic media. The OS can use this information to keep the file system consistent through rescheduled writes.
But enough with that my point is, is that he has a problem I am trying to help him other than just telling him, "well is LOTRO's fault" which by the way is, but not as much as his HDD in his laptop. Even my laptop's loading time is slower than normal because I choose to log out anywhere. But his biggest problem IS his HDD.
long load times are dependant on a lot of things however, here a a few things to consider
1. generaly the higher the character the longer the load time. this is a factor caused by a lot of variables mostly the gear/skills/items that a level 75 character has/owns as an experement i dumped a major portion of one of my capped characters into my housing chests and then logged completely out then back in and suprise i loaded faster. It is measurable make a new character log out then log back in it takes very little time. so level stuf is one cause as very little of our characters is stored on our machines and most of wht is is loaded.verified when we load our characters.
2. location is a big thing too logging out in the middle of nowhere i log in faster then if i log out in lagtrev(galtrev) as the more that has to be rendered the longer it takes to load me in
3. true updload/download connection speed this is affected by bandwidth and time of day
4. time of day depending on the location of the majority of the players are living in lets say west coast of the US as an example ) if it was prime time for that server the more people logging in and or playing makes for more server demand higher demand on the server means lower thruput ie it will take far longer to log in at a busy time then when most are in bed.
5.this ones a bit wierd but try it next time you log out before you do mute your in game sounds in the contrrol panel. I can attest personally that this does speed up getting into the game.
6. your computer depending on so many variables is silly but bus speed amount of memory procesor speed graphics card memory etc all play into "thinking" time taken while your computer crunches on stuff at the load screen. defragging and clearing cache and hard drive speed memory speeded are all factors.
My system is not a laptop. It is a high end desktop from Dell. The video card has just been replaced because of an overheating issue. My hard drive is a 1 TB Serial ATA 2 7200 RPM. I do not experience this slow loading with any other on-line game--World or Warcraft, Rift, Diablo 3. My Windows 7 system startup is measured in seconds and very fast.
I suspect after reading the replies in this thread that the problem is where I have logged off my main character. I have not been playing that much lately and have left him in Galtrev at the recall stone. After today's maintenance is over, I am going to log on to another of my characters who is logged out in the River area and test that theory. All 9 of my characters are L75 and have completed most if not all the new content in the River update. I am also going to move my main to the Galtrev Main Gate area and log him out there and see if that makes a difference.
Thanks to all for the thoughtful and polite responses. If any have further thoughts, I would love to see them. I will post back after I have tried logging in different locations.
My system is not a laptop. It is a high end desktop from Dell. The video card has just been replaced because of an overheating issue. My hard drive is a 1 TB Serial ATA 2 7200 RPM. I do not experience this slow loading with any other on-line game--World or Warcraft, Rift, Diablo 3. My Windows 7 system startup is measured in seconds and very fast.
I suspect after reading the replies in this thread that the problem is where I have logged off my main character. I have not been playing that much lately and have left him in Galtrev at the recall stone. After today's maintenance is over, I am going to log on to another of my characters who is logged out in the River area and test that theory. All 9 of my characters are L75 and have completed most if not all the new content in the River update. I am also going to move my main to the Galtrev Main Gate area and log him out there and see if that makes a difference.
Thanks to all for the thoughtful and polite responses. If any have further thoughts, I would love to see them. I will post back after I have tried logging in different locations.
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Glad to help you solve your problem and sorry that I thought you had a laptop I am use to seeing the XPS as a laptop from dell.
And still look into SSDs they are very worth it. Also would make your system even more faster.
One more thing your motherboard has a SATA R2 controller? If so that is going to slow your read/write speed. If not and it has a SATA R3 controller then I would get a SSD that is SATA R3 so you can have speeds of 540Mb/s read/write for an example instead of 120Mb/s read/write. But at the moment I do see the bottle necking at your HDD too, try buying a 60GB or 128GB SSD when you can and installing your OS and LOTRO on it. You will see a 80% boost of speed.
As follow up and hoping that someone in Turbine's Technical Support area might read this and respond:
I moved my main, a L75 Hunter who has completed all current solo content, to outside the gate at Galtrev. My initial loading of the game and him this morning took approximately 4 minutes. This was somewhat but not much faster than loading at the recall stone in Galtrev. After loading this character and then logging out (not exiting the game), subsequent character loadings were faster but still slow averaging about 2 or so minutes. Reloading the main character also showed the same loading time of about 1.5 to 2 minutes. I have loaded characters logged in Stangard with the same slow loading times.
In talking to a some friends who are also heavily invested in LOTRO, they also report the same slow loading times.
At this point I have to conclude that the loading time problem I am experiencing is client side based and has to do with the fact that I have nine L75s who have almost all competed all current solo content. I do not have this problem with loading times for other MMORPGS such as World of Warcraft, Rift and Diablo 3 where loading times are less than half a minute consistently.
If my conclusions are anywhere close to being correct, I would hope that Turbine is aware of this problem and is working to correct it. I would certainly like to hear from someone at Turbine about the issue. Thanks.
The LOTRO client isn't very efficient with load times or with resource usage, it's not your hardware. I have the same problem and it got worse and worse until at level 75 it can be awful, I can wait quite a few minutes for it to load and there is lots of lag in high level towns, especially in Galtrev and this is on a fairly respectable 6 core PC with an Nvidia GTX480 graphics card + 8GB of memory. In turn I also now play Guild Wars 2 which is far more modern and graphically intense than LOTRO with much better graphics, yet it loads much quicker and there is no slow down no matter how many players there are in one area, often the whole screen can be filled with people all using abilities and it's still flawless, plus there's not even any noticeable graphical pop up on high settings which is often noticeable on most MMOs including LOTRO no matter what PC you own. This proves that LOTRO is inefficient on resources as I often notice serious lag + frame rate drops when there's quite a few players or in busy towns and raiding can be difficult at times (it's usable if I turn down my settings like most people have to), but it is now an ageing MMO that has stood the test of time, okay the expansions are newer, but the main client is still quite old and it restricts what improvements can be made unless the whole game was completely rewritten and overhauled. LOTRO is still an excellent old school MMO however and even though the graphics aren't up to the standards of some more modern games, I still keep coming back for more. Also the people and the LOTRO community are great, I've so far never found such a good community spirit on any other MMO. I expect LOTRO to survive at a lot longer yet and Riders of Rohan is only being released in October (it was delayed). In a few years I hope they will eventually rewrite LOTRO completely and release a blockbuster sequel to being it up to modern standards before the original game becomes so old that it eventually does dies out (probably in 3-5 years time).
You can't compare different games. Not at all. You, I or anyone else have no idea about the technology they are built on. And most of all you can't compare game that originated in 2005 (an assumption considering launch in 2007) to something that is brand new. That's like if you complained about a car manufactured 10 years ago.
Also, it's usually the server, not the client. I mean, when I press the enter Middle Earth button, I barely see any disk activity, and yet it takes 40 seconds until I get ingame. But I don't see anything too bad about it.
Lag in crowds? Well, what do you expect? If you have to load ton of different resources on the fly, it can't be 100% smooth. Ever since I bought a SSD, I don't experience much lag at all.
edit:
In a few years I hope they will eventually rewrite LOTRO completely and release a blockbuster sequel to being it up to modern standards before the original game becomes so old that it eventually does dies out (probably in 3-5 years time)
Excuse me, this is almost hillarious.
Last edited by The-Walrus; Sep 05 2012 at 03:40 AM.
Many philosophical problems are caused by such things as the simple inability to shut up.
The LOTRO client isn't very efficient with load times or with resource usage, it's not your hardware. I have the same problem and it got worse and worse until at level 75 it can be awful, I can wait quite a few minutes for it to load and there is lots of lag in high level towns, especially in Galtrev and this is on a fairly respectable 6 core PC with an Nvidia GTX480 graphics card + 8GB of memory. In turn I also now play Guild Wars 2 which is far more modern and graphically intense than LOTRO with much better graphics, yet it loads much quicker and there is no slow down no matter how many players there are in one area, often the whole screen can be filled with people all using abilities and it's still flawless, plus there's not even any noticeable graphical pop up on high settings which is often noticeable on most MMOs including LOTRO no matter what PC you own. This proves that LOTRO is inefficient on resources as I often notice serious lag + frame rate drops when there's quite a few players or in busy towns and raiding can be difficult at times (it's usable if I turn down my settings like most people have to), but it is now an ageing MMO that has stood the test of time, okay the expansions are newer, but the main client is still quite old and it restricts what improvements can be made unless the whole game was completely rewritten and overhauled. LOTRO is still an excellent old school MMO however and even though the graphics aren't up to the standards of some more modern games, I still keep coming back for more. Also the people and the LOTRO community are great, I've so far never found such a good community spirit on any other MMO. I expect LOTRO to survive at a lot longer yet and Riders of Rohan is only being released in October (it was delayed). In a few years I hope they will eventually rewrite LOTRO completely and release a blockbuster sequel to being it up to modern standards before the original game becomes so old that it eventually does dies out (probably in 3-5 years time).
Thanks. Your experiences are the same as mine. My nine L75 characters evidently is the problem. I have recently been playing Rift and find that my game loads instantly and character loading is just as fast. It is so fast that I hardly have time to read the hints on the loading screen. As I said in my last post I just hope that Turbine will upgrade the client at some point to eliminate this problem. I too love LOTRO and am waiting anxiously for the xpac which I have already pre-purchased.
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