5-10 fps and objects not showing up immediately after login?

[Moropo]

After i login to WoW and enter the world for the first time, the game will be stuttering with 5-10 fps and many objects missing such as players being invisible and then appear. This happens for around the first 5 secs after entering, then all of a sudden it ramps up to 60 fps and never have any problems etc. The performance is rock solid afterwards those first 5 seconds, so i dont really care, and even think its normal? But the main purpose of my thread was to see what was the technical reason this happens? Is it because the game is still loading the objecs etc?

System: i7 2600, radeon 6850, 8gb ram, 1tb hdd 7200rpm

[Prez-]

Think it's the same for everyone, but dont quote me on that. It started happening for me too with 4.0 or whenever the stream content thing came.

[BicycleMafioso]

AFAIK, it's because of the (relatively) slow Harddrive that it has to load the MPQs from. The faster the HDD, the faster it loads

Think it's the same for everyone, but dont quote me on that. It started happening for me too with 4.0 or whenever the stream content thing came.

I have an SSD, I have never experience what he speaks of! It's instantaneous.

[incomingnerfs]

When is the last time you defragged your pc?

Do a defrag and optimize next time you plan to shut down your pc ... auslogics, defraggler, smart defrag 2 ... all free, all have optimize and I know at least two of them have an option for it to shut down your pc when finished, so you can set it and go to bed.

Also, if you are someone who never reboots their pc, a simple restart can be helpful at times as well.

[Nellah]

My hard disk is regularly defragged and it still does this. Unless you have an SSD, expect some chop as the drive thrashes to load everything in. I prefer a bit of thrash at the start with the more aggressive loading they're doing now as opposed to the old way of log in and wait 20 seconds for everyone to appear.

[Moropo]

If it is indeed slow hard drive, why does it ONLY happen when i first login, and not when i zone in to different areas? If it was slow hard drive, wouldnt i get the same issue when zoning in to zones? It only happens when i first login to the game. Also, doesnt the game do all its loading in the loading screen? If anything, i would just experience a longer load time, but not what im experiencing.

And i guess i will defrag and optimize. I never done it because my PC is new (like a month old). I also rarely restart, only when needed by a program install etc. When im not home, or in the night, i just put it to sleep.

[BicycleMafioso]

If it is indeed slow hard drive, why does it ONLY happen when i first login, and not when i zone in to different areas? If it was slow hard drive, wouldnt i get the same issue when zoning in to zones?

If you'd have an even slower HDD, you'd notice it when you teleport to instances as well, and your partymembers characters take a while to appear.

Ironically, in my old laptop with 5400RPM-drives, only the latter (instances) happened, but not the former (logging in).

[Asera]

I have an SSD, I have never experience what he speaks of! It's instantaneous.

My city loads were pretty close to instantaneous on my Caviar Blacks, then became pretty well instant on my SSD. Blue bar didn't change much between WDC Black and an SSD for me.

OP has a case of the slow, fragmented and nnon-optimized mechanical drive syndrome!

[BicycleMafioso]

My city loads were pretty close to instantaneous on my Caviar Blacks, then became pretty well instant on my SSD. Blue bar didn't change much between WDC Black and an SSD for me.

/shrug - I've never played from a 7200RPM before. I've had two laptops (2006 and 2008) before this one, and before those two, I had an old IDE-drive in my AMD-system from 2002.
EDIT: Might've been even older. But I think 2002.

[Nellah]

If it is indeed slow hard drive, why does it ONLY happen when i first login, and not when i zone in to different areas? If it was slow hard drive, wouldnt i get the same issue when zoning in to zones? It only happens when i first login to the game. Also, doesnt the game do all its loading in the loading screen? If anything, i would just experience a longer load time, but not what im experiencing.

The game loads environments on the "Loading" screen, but loads most characters and equipment on the fly. In major cities especially, where there are a ton of characters that need to be loaded up, it takes much longer than in a dungeon where there are only 5 people and a few different mob templates.

My city loads were pretty close to instantaneous on my Caviar Blacks, then became pretty well instant on my SSD. Blue bar didn't change much between WDC Black and an SSD for me.

OP has a case of the slow, fragmented and nnon-optimized mechanical drive syndrome!

Yeah, I have a 1TB Caviar Black that Win7 and WoW both run off, there is about 2-7 seconds of thrash loading into Stormwind depending on the time of day (I'm on a high/full pop server.) Been looking into an SSD, load times for SC2 and WoW can take a long time when first loading in.

[Asera]

However, SC2 load times are generally unaffected from my own testing. It's one of the only games i've found that doesn't see a great benefit from being on an SSD.

Yeah, my SC2 load times didn't change at all between a VertexII and my WDC Black. Even WoW didn't change too much though, but that's the power of short stroking playing a part there.