Has anybody tried HZ on a solid state drive?

[Vermithraxx]

Topic says it all, Has anybody tried HZ on a solid state drive?

I'm about to pick up an Mtron MOBI 3000 (100/80 MB/sec sustained read/write for my fellow tech heads) and wondered if anybody else tried it.

Aside from the blessed silence of HZ no longer clicking along as it plays any game performance increase?

[tjl]

since there are no moving parts, they are noticeably faster than plain hard drives. and since HZ does a lot of disk read/writing, I'm going to say yes, you will see a performance increase. let us know once its working though

[Steelclaw]

HZ does do a hefty amount of writing, there are a couple of logs that get (re)written no matter what your logging settings are. This may concentrate wear on one area of the device. (Flash memory can only be erased and written a finite number of times.)

As for performance, don't hold your breath. The initial load times will be faster (the stuff you see on the splash screen) as well as porting, but don't expect instantaneous ports -- the client still has to wait for the server to tell it what to load.

I think you'll have better bang for your buck if you bump your memory up... like 4GB or more. HZ will swell to around a maximum of 2GB. Windows should use the remaining free memory as disk cache, which is faster than a solid state drive.

[Spirit]

(Flash memory can only be erased and written a finite number of times.)

Finite life for sure, but in terms of the numbers of reads and writes... I'd wager the hd would fail first as they also have a design life. I wouldn't worry about this aspect of the hardware for running horizons.

Rakku

[Fratricide]

I would have to agree with SC here... If you want to spend the $$ just go with adding some more memory... up to 3 GB for 32 bit OS and 3+ GB for 64 bit OS... That is where you will see your actual speed increase more then anything else. I did see a bit of a bump in porting and initial load speeds when I moved my World Cache files to a separate drive, and depending on the device(s), I can see where that might become significant, but only when you have to actually load that data. If you are using the Blight client, and port more then a couple times, you will be doing quite a bit more reading, as it actually does dump the residual data from the areas you have previously visited.

[Spirit]

I would have to agree with SC here... If you want to spend the $$ just go with adding some more memory... up to 3 GB for 32 bit OS and 3+ GB for 64 bit OS... That is where you will see your actual speed increase more then anything else. I did see a bit of a bump in porting and initial load speeds when I moved my World Cache files to a separate drive, and depending on the device(s), I can see where that might become significant, but only when you have to actually load that data. If you are using the Blight client, and port more then a couple times, you will be doing quite a bit more reading, as it actually does dump the residual data from the areas you have previously visited.

I've also gone from 1gb to 2gb and, ok a faster chip too, but the difference was very noticable. Even on Vista, when it worked before I patched the OS, it performed really rather well. So I also agree that going to at least 2gb should help your Horizons run well for mush less cash than a solid state drive.

Rakku

[Vermithraxx]

Ok, got the drive, moved the game, figured I'd post an update:

No change at all.

There's a plot on Chaos with ~100 tents. I'd thought that the texture was being loaded each and every time from the HD, hence all the clicking. Turns out the slowdown is from the client/server looking up each object individually and the server slooooowly replying.

Addressing the rest of the posts... I've always had 4 gigs (only a 32bit OS tho. I dodged the Vista bullet.)

Fratricide: How did you move you World Cache to a different drive? (Different drive compared to what? The game itself? Or did you mean versus your pagefile/OS?

Blight client: ROFL, is THAT the problem? I do a *single* port away from Tent City, port back, and wait. The textures have all been flushed, and everything has to be re-looked up on the server database and reloaded.

[Steelclaw]

Ok, got the drive, moved the game, figured I'd post an update:

No change at all.

Ouch! Can you get your money back?

[Fratricide]

Fratricide: How did you move you World Cache to a different drive? (Different drive compared to what? The game itself? Or did you mean versus your pagefile/OS?

The information I used to do this proceedure was provided by someone else on these boards, and I don't remember whom nor what the name of the thread was, nor if it is still remaining on the forums, but here goes in a nutshell.

1) Using a drive, separate from the one that windows/horizons is on, create either a partition of no less then 5 GB, to ensure there is enough space for the world cache for all 3 shards. (if you don't know how to create a partition in windows on a new drive, see the windows help pages, they have all the instructions posted there)

2) Then, when you name the drive, instead of giving it a drive letter, Mount the drive to a folder called World Cache.. make sure it is spelled exactly like the one in your Horizons folder.. or else it won't work.

3) Copy all your world cache files from your horizons World Cache folder over to the new Partition.

4) Delete the World Cache folder in your Horizons folder and move your new Partition folder into its place.

Note: When creating the initial partition and assigning it its name, make it easy on yourself and create the mount file in the C:/ directory so that you can find it easily.

5) Start up horizons to make sure everything is working as it is supposed to. I know it helped my loading times greatly, as the world cache was able to load at the same time as the paging files were able to run, and whatever else Horizons and Windows had to throw at it..

See if that helps ya out some, in my case, I was porting at like 75-90 secs or so a port, and it reduced it to about 20 secs... but I'm sure that is just my instance.

Have fun playing with it anyhow..

[Vermithraxx]

Ouch! Can you get your money back?

LOL, no need, I bought the hardware because I have a use for it, not expressly to put the game onto. As it is, I *like* how quiet my machine has become while playing HZ, and I still have plenty of room for the other project, so its money well spent.



Fratricide: Understood, and thanks! I'll have to try that out, tho I'm pretty sure I'm at the upper hardware limit for this game. No matter what I do, the server side is the cause of all my lag, the client doesn't handle enough for my hardware to make a difference.

[Ivy]

Fratricide, does that tweak really help ? has anybody tried it ? I sounds very interesting.

[gopher65]

Fratricide, does that tweak really help ? has anybody tried it ? I sounds very interesting.

Yup it helps, but I don't know if it is necessary to separate out the world cache like that. What I did was just plop a new 5 gig partition (only play on chaos, so only 1 WC) down on my secondary hard drive and install HZ on that. I saw a major increase in client performance when I did this (mostly to load times). It's possible that Fratricide's method works better (though I've not tried it).

Personally my guess, and I'm no expert, is that as long as you have HZ on a different drive than the pagefile you're going to see an increase in performance. If they are both on the same drive it's going to be bouncing back and forth between the world_cache folder and the pagefile I'd imagine.

The bit with the partition is just because HZ likes to constantly write new little dinky files and of course they go in the first available space, which isn't necessarily with the other little dinky HZ files. So if you don't have HZ on a separate partition you'll probably have to defrag a lot. I've never had to defragment HZ's partition yet though.

[Nidhoggr]

Just so you know, a solid state drive may be the future but right now the technology is way too expensive. On the mobile market maybe, but I have a Western Digital Raptor (in fact two 74GB models in Raid0). Read/write performance is great. You can definitely tell its quite a deal faster than a standard hard drive in this task.

At least on my system the loading times are much faster. Performance is still greatly bottlenecked by my processor, but simple portal loading times are under 10 seconds. Of course this isn't a benchmark since I am not porting to the same locations for comparision. Also my world cache is smaller, and I haven't ported to any heavily populated areas.

While Raptors aren't exactly cheap. About a $1/gig, flash solid state drives are more than $10/gig, and of course standard drives are cents on the dollar.

[Fratricide]

As Gopher pointed out.. yes.. it does work.. I had read elsewhere on these boards someone doing the very same thing, and it helped them greatly, so I tried it myself.. the biggest file that gets written to is the world cache file. Trust me it is crazy how much writing and reading goes on the file during porting and initial loading.

Anyway, at one point in time, I had 3 separate drive sets.. 1 for mainly everything in the PC including windows.. all the games.. etc... 1 had a HZ partition just for the world cache that was mounted as mentioned previously.. and 1 specifically for my page files...

The page file drive sped up a couple things in the computer but I didn't notice any real changes with HZ as I already had that other drive set aside for the world cache...

An additional comment I'd like to add.. on that system.. my main drive and my extra drive with the HZ partition were both set up in separate Raid 0 configurations using SATA1... and the page file drive was just an old IDE 40GB drive I had lying about.

If you followed all that... your doing better then some I suppose.. if not and would like more clarification.. I spose your welcome to post a question about it here..

[Vermithraxx]

*chuckle* Ok, since we're still discussing hardware, I suppose I should post the specs for my 'test bed'.

The system is a year old, was born on Dec 14th 2006, my wife named him HAL and says he's my son.

Motherboard: EVGA 680i chipset
Processor: qx6700 Intel Quad Core
Graphics: Dual Nvidia GTX 8800 (SLI)
HD#1: C: drive - WD Raptor 10,000 RPM 150 gig
HD#2: D: drive - Dual WD Raptor 10,000 RPM 150 gig in RAID0 format.
HD#3: F: drive - MTRON MSD SATA6025 (16 gigs 100m/s read, 80m/s write)

All the usual bells, whistles and UV lights, Dual layer DVD burner, etc.

Only special I probably should note is that I liquid cooled the entire operation... The CPU's overclocked to about 4GHZ.

So far I've tried HZ on C: drive, D: drive, and now F: drive. When the high read rates on D: didn't enhance performance, I thought perhaps the constant micro-file loading was being hampered by seek times.

Not so much.

I'm also what one forum-poster referred to as a 'file hacker' I'll tamper with anything, just to see what'll happen. One series of changes included replacing a large chunk of AGF files with low-byte nothings. I was trying to negate the load times again, by making them 1.) all the same file and 2.) tiny.

Ok, that didn't work either. What I DID get is a world that loads a little faster in some cases. (I killed all the plant life. No more massive trees in Parsinia that you practically fly past before they can load.) Plus, the TexMem footprint has practically vanished.

I do have a idea for solving my slow-loading plot issue, but it involves learning about, and then hacking, into the sector.def files, I'll save that for another thread.

[Balthizar]

I think your loading times have to be a Blight problem. My system is not as good as yours and my load time's or only around 10-20sec. max for loging in and porting some times shorter. Like when I am gathering alot of 1 resoures and taking it back to silos runing the same path over and over I get lower port/recall times. But I'm on Chaos.

System.

AMD2 64 (sorry I only have dualcore) OC to 3.3G

M2N-SLI Deluxe Lifestyles Motherboard from ASUS.(Good board for AMD chips and overclocking)

4g DDR2 800mhz ram OC 933

Geforce 8600GT SLI OC both the cards and the Mainboards PCI-E slots.

Hard C:/Vista 64 D:/xp 32bit

80G rapter's Raid1 all three. Partioned off for Vista and xp and alittle more saved just incase I have a need for it for something and don't realy wish to clear hardrives. Also this are the somewhat newer verison 3.0G interface and there thiner and omost no noise to them. I have to hold my ear up to the tower to here them working over my fans and my fans are on Asus-Q control that slows them down and speeds them up based on the heat in my system. So my system is very noise friendly.

Normal cooling fans 8 of them wires tied back and away from stuff. No overheating anywere works great for 10dx games and vista. And works better on HZ then anyother system I have ever owned and used before.

They fix the server side and we will be blazing

Edit: Just to note Ram/cpu/PCI-E SLI are overclocking features on my Mainboard. Working on both Vist/XP
The Video cards are a runing program down loaded from Nvida and they are only overclock in Vista. I only play Istaria on XP everything alse I play on Vista and there for did not feel the need to spend the very long amount of time it takes to find the stable but fastest point to OC Istaria.

[tygan]

I think part of the client's problem is all the "eras" of work that have been done on it. Mostly honest standard dev-time, some panicked-let's-buy-modules-and-strap-them-on time, some relative neglect, and again some honest dev time.

That's a hard life cycle for a code base to go through. I can't imagine what might be in there.

Of course I may be way off-base but that was my impression from all info I've heard.

Some of those systems are pretty well best of breed in the consumer market, and should run the sucker pretty well flawlessly. The graphics aren't the cutting edge stuff that should push those systems so there must be something going on.

Not a knock on VI, may they prosper and flourish, they are doing a bang up job with what they have.

[gopher65]

Mostly honest standard dev-time, some panicked-let's-buy-modules-and-strap-them-on time, some relative neglect, and again some honest dev time.

It should be panicked, relative neglect, complete neglect, and finally short-of-change neglect.