Why We Lag Now?

[Huzzaa]

It's a limitation of CRZ/Sharding. It was stated by a blue in the official tech forums, it's why open world is pretty crappy at times due to load. WoW servers are hosted in a cloud now, it's how they can spin up servers at will (like was shown in Classic) I really don't know the ins and outs of it all but i suspect that the cloud cannot handle a lot of people near each other in CRZ since no one knows what kind of load is being shared in the cloud. It's basically Blizzard being cheap on servers.

tldr; Blizzard is being cheap on severs, it's another reason why i hate CRZ/Sharding

They went the Kubernetes route.

Something I've deployed myself. It's really fun stuff but the performance implications are really a mystical topic often enough, and requires a lot of reading and understanding how the multi-layer faceting works.

You have the Hardware. Then you usually have the Hypervisor. Then you have the VM running an underlying OS. Then you have a container orchestration system, usually docker that runs your namespace seperated virtual OS(Linux kernel namespaces). Then you finally have your blank OS image settled on top of that with as little jargon as possible and finally. You have the game binaries and necessary libraries that execute the server code itself.

Count the layers. And give it a guess where the performance drops. It's pretty nuts to be honest. If you're running at the edge of your hardwares limits, which Blizz probably is, I wouldn't even know myself. And I've deployed quite a few clusters.

I'd personally drop the hypervisor, but you usually build the cloud on a hypervisor so... myeah. If that's there then oh boy.


I believe if logic's correct, what they call a CRZ. We in the cloud would call a pod. And a pod is basically a seperate virtual operating system running its own instance of something. Essentially, there's multiples of near identical instances of the same server running. You're just connecting between them.

Anyways, I personally don't think they have cheap servers. What I do think, is that they've overestimated their compute resources a lot and often. Plus, I'd be willing to bet that the inter-layer latencies play a large part in increasing the perceived lag per say.

My honest opinion. It'd be better if they'd drop the cloud for open world areas, as it's seemingly not working as needed often enough. A strong single-threaded server with good ST performance beats the hypervisor with 2.7Ghz Xeons still, for this sort of application in my mind.

That's all assuming that they're running it like most companies do.

[Soon-TM]

Do you remember the good ol' days of WotLK Lagaran? Well, they've returned, in the form of Lagjatar, Vale of Eternal Lagging and N'yalotha, the Lagging City. Good times!

[Elias01]

I explained it 2 posts above. This has nothing to do with server side math. Just the exponential server traffic for each player. It's cheaper to calculate 100000000000000000 dice rolls than to handle 40 players for 1 second.

You havent explaoined anything. Devs never said it cant be fixed. They said they are looking into issue. And yes its casued by too many calulcations per tick for every single player. And no there wasnt any lag back in day if you had actual decent internet connection. Go and ty play classic. You need like 200+ players at same spot to cause server lag.

[Clozer]

You havent explaoined anything. Devs never said it cant be fixed. They said they are looking into issue. And yes its casued by too many calulcations per tick for every single player. And no there wasnt any lag back in day if you had actual decent internet connection. Go and ty play classic. You need like 200+ players at same spot to cause server lag.

What? You have no idea man. My guild literally transferred to a low pop realm because of the lag 10 years ago. It was soooo much worse than it is today. And the devs said they can't fix it. That's one of the main reasons for layering and sharding....

[Extrakt]

Only place I have delay is in tiragarde sound. I just cant make myself lvl there. Everything is 0.3 second delayed. I always praised and played wow for it fluidity so that was a big turn off.

Other zones or horde zones, no issue for me.

[Syegfryed]

My computer is "normal" not a big deal, but i did fine, i could even play the game and have chrome opened watching some shit on youtube

The next day of patch 8.3 it was like hell, the lag was so obnoxious i could not even do the quests of how bad optimized the game was, they try to minimize the problem but if too much void shit pop jut is just terrible, also, big cities the lag is troublesome.

If you pull too many shit on visions? lag, too many procs on raid? fucking lag

I do hope they fix those things in shadowlands but i thinking it will become worse.

[kaminaris]

The next day of patch 8.3 it was like hell, the lag was so obnoxious i could not even do the quests of how bad optimized the game was

It has nothing to do with your PC but with the amount of people that came in to checkout the patch.

[Syegfryed]

It has nothing to do with your PC but with the amount of people that came in to checkout the patch.

it was like that for like 3-4 months before they they to minimize the lag

[kaminaris]

it was like that for like 3-4 months before they they to minimize the lag

More like 1-2 months. And they really didn't do anything to "minimize it" maybe fixing some broken stuff that could cause a lag like world boss abilities but other than that, it's just effect of massive influx of players.

[Syegfryed]

More like 1-2 months. And they really didn't do anything to "minimize it" maybe fixing some broken stuff that could cause a lag like world boss abilities but other than that, it's just effect of massive influx of players.

explain to me how the influx of players can lag my visions, my mythic dungeon, my small raid or a completely empty zone in a dead server

[Ealyssa]

explain to me how the influx of players can lag my visions, my mythic dungeon, my small raid or a completely empty zone in a dead server

Servers aren't physical entities for a long time now. Everything run on farms alocating loads. The good ol day of single blade servers for a realm are no more.
Your dungeon doesn't run on its own server
Your raid doesn’t run on its own server
Your vision doesn't run on its own server
Hope you got it...

[Nerovar]

I don't know if it's necessarily tied to azerite etc. it's probably more due to all the scaling systems that are in place. We've had this issue in Legion already and there weren't any Azerite traits back then.

Before then I never really had any issues with epic battlegrounds or large world pvp fights.

[Syegfryed]

Servers aren't physical entities for a long time now. Everything run on farms alocating loads. The good ol day of single blade servers for a realm are no more.
Your dungeon doesn't run on its own server
Your raid doesn’t run on its own server
Your vision doesn't run on its own server
Hope you got it...

no, i didn't

but again, how just when those 8.3 void bulshit pop up i got a massive and infernal lag have anything to do with the influx of players

[Malikath]

I don't know if it's necessarily tied to azerite etc. it's probably more due to all the scaling systems that are in place. We've had this issue in Legion already and there weren't any Azerite traits back then.

Before then I never really had any issues with epic battlegrounds or large world pvp fights.

this, the added layer of calculations needed PER TARGET are what causes the exponential lag we see in large-scale engagements.

[Nerovar]

this, the added layer of calculations needed PER TARGET are what causes the exponential lag we see in large-scale engagements.

Yeah, that's what I thought as well. If you have lots of additional factors like procs while also adding extra calculations for every single spell based on the target's level, item level etc. it's bound to have a performance impact at some point.

[kaminaris]

this, the added layer of calculations needed PER TARGET are what causes the exponential lag we see in large-scale engagements.

It really depends on formula, if fomula is just a math equation then no, it doesn't affect performance.

[Huzzaa]

It really depends on formula, if fomula is just a math equation then no, it doesn't affect performance.

You need to be more specific here.

Because what you said makes little sense. Formula is just a math equation? All the calculations in the game regarding dmg you deal, anything really are all math equations. If it's not a formula using math equation it doesn't affect performance?

So if it's an alchemical formula it affects performance?

And if it's a math equation it doesn't? So nothing affects performance?

[sister]

You need to be more specific here.

Because what you said makes little sense. Formula is just a math equation? All the calculations in the game regarding dmg you deal, anything really are all math equations. If it's not a formula using math equation it doesn't affect performance?

So if it's an alchemical formula it affects performance?

And if it's a math equation it doesn't? So nothing affects performance?

I had to dust this old account off just to say that, as a fellow IT professional, I'm in awe of the fact that people are arguing with you about this.

[kaminaris]

You need to be more specific here.

Because what you said makes little sense. Formula is just a math equation? All the calculations in the game regarding dmg you deal, anything really are all math equations. If it's not a formula using math equation it doesn't affect performance?

So if it's an alchemical formula it affects performance?

And if it's a math equation it doesn't? So nothing affects performance?

You would need to understand basic math first and how CPUs deal with math, also which math operations are costly and which ones are cheap.
Math formula and it's complexity has direct correlation to performance.

[docterfreeze]

Every tuesday night in nyalotha up until I stopped playing there would be very noticeable input lag and combat would completely pause at least once per night. Everyone in the guild experienced it. Don't remember anything like that happening in uldir when the amount of players was likely higher.