Disk thrashing on test

[BuzzBumpenzilla]

Hi everyone. Haven't played on Test for awhile and was wondering if the memory consumption/disk thrashing issue that is currently present on open (I have 512mb of memory and need to kill the TT process after only one CJ - the VM Size for TT balloons to over 500mb alone) has been taken care of yet on Test.

I'd be willing to do a CJ on Test to find out for myself, if I knew when one was getting put together.

Live Chat of course only tells me to make more memory available for Toontown. I kill all unneccessary XP processes and have no other apps running, and kill iexplore immediately after starting toontown, which gives TT about 400mb to play with. Should be more than enough, considering what the Toontown application does, and the simplicity of the graphics.

I also believe that many users are calling this problem "lag" and are thinking it has something to do with the TT servers/busy districts, and not reporting it.

[madamS]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but no, it is not fixed on test. On one of the updates, they referred to "latency". I think this is the same thing. We report it all the time, but of course get various responses, such as the one you referred to, none of which are helpful. Disney's attitude seems to be that all of us have the exact same computer problems, and none of us have enough sense to check out our drivers, or make sure that we are not running multiple programs. It got much worse with gardening. I will do anything to avoid going to my estate, because I know I am going to have to restart after I do. As far as a cj- if you want to do one, be sure to check out the schedule that is stickied in the test section. There are not always enough people to go, but this is your best bet.
Join us in Test! we may not be faster than open, but we have fun!

[Bnkzsahm]

Test doesn't SEEM to be as bad as open, but as the previous poster said, you can send bug reports till you're blue in the face (as we all have) and they'll tell you it's your driver, your server, the phases of the moon, you, or your puter...but most certainly not them. Avoiding your estate seems to help a tad though! Give it a whirl though, test is a great place!

Bnkzsahm

[BuzzBumpenzilla]

Thx for the info. I'm aware of toontown support's generic responses. I even sent then a composite jpg showing annotated screenshots of task manager with page faults/vm size columns present for the processes page and the performance page at the following points:

Prior to launching Internet Explorer (404mb free, 128mb swap file, 2% utilized)
After launching toontown, with IE running (IE 7 ate 50mb)
After killing the IE process (memory released to heap)
After toon landed in Brrgh PG at startup in empty district (TT at 184mb)
After toon teleported to Nutty River (slight lag entering busy PG, expected)
After entering Polar Place (operating normally, TT at 202mb)
After entering Law HQ (operating normally, TT at 224mb)
After entering CJ doors (operating normally. TT at 232mb)
After completing CJ (40 second disk thrash to "land" in PG, TT at 364mb)
After entering gag shop (1 minute disk thrash)
After exiting gag shop (50 second disk thrash)
After teleporting to empty district (1 minute disk thrash)
After teleporting to DDL (1 min, 45 sec disk thrash)
At this point, memory stats were:
8mb free memory
354mb in use by TT
412mb peak use by TT
608mb VM Size for TT
over 400,000 page faults for TT
Swap file was 864mb, 84% utilized
Average network utilization for the entire session, 5%
Peak network utilization for session, 32%
After killing TT process
Swap file dropped to 172mb, 4% utilized
402mb RAM free

Tried limiting the size of the swap file to 200 mb, TT crashed unceremoniously.

I really wish Disney would just let us know if the system requirements have gone up and TT just needs 512mb of RAM to itself or if they are working on a fix for this problem. Greg Wiatroski did not answer the question "What are TT devs doing to alleviate the performance issues related to memory consumption/disk thrashing and lag sensitivity" in the recent HoC chat session.

Re playing test, I have 3 toons there already with law suits and maxed gags, and I'm very familiar with the goings on there. Thanks for the gracious invite back though, and for the comments.

[Murky]

After planting and watering for awhile, I ran two test races then went to the Lawbot HQ.

When I first start out, my Total Physical Memory is 1048048 (1 gig) and stays that way. The Available and System Cache categories add up to that amount.

The more I play, the smaller the total of Available and System Cache become, meaning I have less and less memory available for play.

[IMG]http://img400.**************/img400/8517/taskmanagermr6.th.png[/IMG]

Any time Toontown is running, the CPU usage is 100 percent, so I know that any other program I try to run will be slow in responding.

The PF Usage is 621 MB, which means that it wants more than 512 mb of memory to simply run. This computer has a gig, the other two I use have 512 and they, of course, have more lag. Right now on one of the other computers it shows PF Usage as 467 MB, which tells me the computer is reserving some of the space to function, but it would be like the this computer and be up to 621 MB, more or less, if it could.

Basically, I recognize that Toontown will dominate my computer while it is running (CPU 100 percent), that it requires more than 512 MB to run comfortably (PF Usage 621 MB) and that the more time I spend playing, the less actual memory I have available (Available, 295320, and System Cache 413716 do not add up to Total 1048048, so some of the Total is no longer available.)

The net result is that the computer will have to rely more and more on the hard drive to provide memory to keep the game going.

I don't know that Disney can do much to fix that because the game relies so much on graphics, and that is what makes the memory "disappear." My solution is at least 1 gig of ram (768 would work better than 512, of course) and expect to reboot after awhile. 2 gigs would increase playtime.

Egor, Murky's husband.

[Kit T. Kat]

i can multi task on my laptop

2 gigs of ram, 2.16 ghz processor, and a 54.0 mbps wireless internet, and i normally have it running from 7 am - 8 pm and i log onto toontown full screen and get some lag but not much, and when im in windowed i get very little lag, but i do get some, and toontown isnt the most hardcore game on my laptop

rollercoaster tycoon and age of empires 3 have topped over the resource list at around 500,000K in windows task manager and the 2nd tab called Processes, i think toontown is like under 100K, and so far i have only got my laptop to 100% in about 3 situations, if the mouse gets stuck clicking on Internet Explorer icon, or AOE3 or RCT3 freeze and i have to control+escape and go to process and end program from there

[FauxPaw]

We just recently added 512 of ram to both our computers and have noticed a significant difference. (We had 512 to start so now we have a full gig) We still have to restart the computer after playing for awhile, but the time we can play is noticably longer. The game seems smoother as well. Teleporting is faster, no lag. Also, we purchased the next better video card. I recommend buying a little more memory. I know it stinks that we need to do this in order to play tt with more ease, but the difference is worth it. We lucked out since both our computers are the same. We were able to buy the 1 gig of ram for the first computer and then just transferred over the 512 from the first computer to the second-giving both the full 1 gig.

Eventually we will probably add a little more-but for now this seems to have helped a lot.

[BuzzBumpenzilla]

Added an additional 256 mb for a total of 768. Toontown is playable now after boss battles, takes a while to get somewhat lagged. Disk thrashing has pretty much cleared up. TT maxes out its memory usage somewhere around 480 mb on my machine, PF usage still around 760mb.