Slowing Down

[KhybersGhost]

Wanted to ask around and see if anyone else has had this problem.

I've noticed that as time goes on, the client seems to get a bit slower. While our games are still able to function well enough, I notice that even when I initially load the module, the amount of time it takes has gradually increased. (Even getting a brief, 5-6 second "Program not responding" message before it finally loads)

For context, I've been playing a campaign with the same set of players for the last 5-6 months. I use a single "core/skeleton" module which essentially only contains the players characters and a handful of frequent use maps of the region. I export and use other adventure modules I've made for additional content.

I have closed most other non-essential modules (player resource modules and bestiaries etc) and have cleared previous data via the Flushdb command.

Curious if there is something else I am doing (or not doing) that might be causing this?

System is a quad-core 3.2ghz machine with 8gb, Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium

[Trenloe]

Check the size of your DB.XML file in the campaign directory, it can get quite big over time. This contains a lot of entries.

I see PC entries in DB.XML getting quite large over time - purely because more and more "stuff" is being added to as the game goes on. Plus, if you have a few PCs in the campaign not being used, this increases the size of DB.XML quite a lot too.

Might be worth connecting on the same machine to localhost and then looking in the cache directory created and seeing what is the large things that are being downloaded.

[madman]

Well I thought I would post a comparison for you. I have been running my current Pathfinder game for three months, the time it takes for me to load the campaign server is like 45 seconds. My DB file is 4.7 MB, my campaign folder is 120 MB, Windows Vista 64 i7 with 12 GB ram. Games run smooth with Bestiary 1,2,3, PFRPG Rules, Paizo spells, Magic Items, Poisons, Maps of all known areas on Golarion (very large), Maps of every city produced by Paizo, and a charts mod I made with 45 charts from various books. Game is a consistent 6-7 players.

The only slow down I can say to have seen is the initial loading of FG. It does say not responding when it loads sometimes, though it never seems to screw up it just takes almost a minute to load.

Chris

[KhybersGhost]

Thanks for the replies!

@madman My games still function fine as well, its mostly the initial load time that was concerning me. I didn't want to run into a situation where the amount of data being loaded became so great that it would lock me out of a given module altogether.

Running 6 players at the moment and have had a lot of stuff open in game without too much issue. (Loading large maps have crashed client on only a handful of occasions)

My db file is 1.6mb with a campaign folder total size of 65mb

[Griogre]

Another thing that cause the initial load to be slow on the client are size of extensions as these have to be downloaded from the server. The flushdb command is your friend. Depending on the size of your maps having to transfer maps owned by clients can make a real impact on client load times if you make maps that are more than a few hundred K then considered using it often.

Edit: One 4E game I've been running a few years is 9.67 megs most of it in the chat logs (after a chat log gets over a couple of megs I rename it and start another one) 5,912K in logs. The db.xml file is 1,127K. Try making sure you don't keep much other than characters in your main campaign. The client cache file size on this campaign is tiny, 315K because I flushed the db not long ago.

Another game 4E game where they started at 1st and are now 10th has a campaign folder of 11.5 megs, a db.xml of 1,137K, and a chat log of 5,307K, its apparently bigger than the other because I have about 3 megs in maps in it, I've been sloppy and tossed in a dozen or so overland and other encounter maps that should really be in a module. :p The player cache on this one is also small, 463K, because I also flushed it not that long ago.

[Yospeck]

- Remove any tokens you aren't using/don't need for random encounters
- Remove any images you don't need
- Rename your Chatlog.html to Chatlog2.html (might work, not sure how this affects the loading time) so that it saves it but will start a new Chatlog.

I know the Chatlog.html can get big over time (used to take me an age to load that files up after a couple of months).