repetative disconnects

[mgholson]

Hi, I'm GM of a PF game thats gone about 6 months, every now and again we'll be inflicted with a player getting constantly disconnected. They come back and sometimes it works and sometimes they get disconnected over and over again. I've always thought the problem was on their end. Sometimes we'll go through a whole game without a single disconnect.

Last night we had many disconnects and some of the players were experiencing lag, loading the campaign from the start is getting slow for me as well.

I just checked my memory usage and saw that FG was using 1, 075,000 KB wow. I've never checked memory usage before.

I've got several modules loaded, lots of hi-res tokens, going to unload what I don't sue and see if that helps.

[Trenloe]

The memory won't be making much difference - unless you have less than 2GB of memory on your computer, in which case it may be forcing the computer to use virtual memory and slowing it down a lot. FG will experience serious issues (and probably just close without warning) when it approaches 2GB of memory use (4GB on a 64 bit Windows operating system).

When you GM do you use a wireless or wired connection? I find that some wireless connections aren't any good for a GM (and even some players) with the regular data being passed between the GM and player. Certainly the wireless connection in my rental apartment is no good for either playing or being a GM. Even if you have plugged a cable into your computer if it has a wireless connection (like most laptops) it may still be actually using wireless rather than the wired (my laptop certainly does), make sure you disable the wireless on your computer if you are using a wired connection.

It would be worth getting your players to check if they are using a wireless/wired connection too.

Regarding the slow down of you loading the campaign from the start. Open the <FG App Data Directory.\campaigns\<your campaign name> directory in Windows explorer and see how large the db.xml file is. This is what is loaded by the GM when you start a Fantasy Grounds campaign. If you have been running for a while, this could well be large (something in excess of 1MB is large). The main cause for large size is multiple player characters (remove those that are no longer being used - export them first just in case you may want to use them sometime in the future), lots of story entries, many NPC entries, items, notes, etc.. It can be sometimes worth going through and clearing some of these out - or moving them into modules for activation when you need them.

[damned]

here is another basic test that all of you can run...

open 2 CMD prompts (XP: start->run->cmd or W7: start->cmd)
in the first ping your gateway with a static ping. whats your gateway? thats usually your router. to find this address do an ipconfig in the cmd window and look for default gateway. it will usually look something like: 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.127 or 192.168.0.254 or something else all together. it will however have 4 strings of numbers separated by 3 dots.
to ping it continuously use:

ping 192.168.1.1 -t
substituting 192.168.1.1 for your gateway ip address.
then you want to do the same in your 2nd cmd prompt but ping something outside your network. preferably something close like your ISP website or ISP gateway server. anyway use your isp website as a first choice or even www.google.com as the closest google server will usually respond.

ping www.google.com -t

basically you are looking for 0-1% packet loss on the local network. anything more and you have some local network issue - maybe your wireless signal isnt quite reliable where you are sitting or the cable is a bit loose/dodgy.
on the www.google.com you should also expect something very low - maybe 0-2% loss. if you get loss - is it just a packet here and there - probably not an issue. if you are getting 4+ packets in a row again there is some issue - this could be congestion or it could be your connection dropping in and out.
have your players do the same.
if someone gets disconnected - check if you or they are getting ping dropouts at similar (usually a bit earlier) time.