Full System Hang

[Kaithro]

Every few minutes or so my system will completely hang while playing PS.  All I can do is power it down or hit the reset button.  I did not used to have this problem with PS in the earliest two builds so I suspect it is client based, maybe a graphic code thing.  I have tried various settings changes using ps setup and options in-game. 

AMD Duron 1.3Ghz  (Windows XP, SP2)
640 MB Ram
Geforce4 mx440 128mb   (93.71 forceware driver)
Soundblaster Live Value
Cable connection

Has anyone had a similar problem and found the solution?  It's not crashing so I can't get diagnostic info.  Event manager doesn't show anything other than the system starting up over and over.

**edit**

Hmm, a while after posting I was fiddling again and looked at the NVIDIA setup in my control panel, adjusted it from best quality to best performance and over the last few hours I have had markedly fewer hangs.  Maybe it is more of a driver related issue.  I don't really know if the fixes required would be up to Nvidia, Microsoft, or the devs heh, or maybe even me.  Oh well, just thought I'd post this little update in case it helps anyone.

*edit*

That last post was right after a hang, which turned out to be the first of many that happened every few seconds :/  Now I think the more stable period may have been more related to a low server population during the wee hours of the night.  But.. as you can see, I don't know for sure what the cause of the problem is.

***edit***

Over the last three days I have found a pattern.  During the period of 3 am to 10-11 am pacific time I get very stable play.  Any time before or after this window and I am constantly hanging.  Now, when the server went down one night and I tried to connect to see how the client would handle it, it hung.  This made me wonder, if the server drops my connection does my client just hang?  Maybe these problems are all about my distance from the server.  I live in Western Canada and the server is in Signapore.  Sometimes my ping is around 350-450ms, other times like outside that window it's up to 750 ms with up to 25% packet loss.  My connection latency tests out as 115ms so it looks like trip time is a real issue here.

So now the question is, can I configure my client not to give up easily?  I mean is there a timeout value I can change without messing things up.  And, does the server discriminate in some way that causes it to drop connections or even reset them and in so doing, hang the client?

Questions..questions.. I know.. I'm like that, sorry if it bothers anyone.

[ Please avoid making one post right after the other in the same thread, on the same day. Just "Modify" your first post to add more information. --Karyuu ]

[ Ok, but may I ask what the reasoning is behind that policy?]

[Karyuu]

Kaithro: reading 2-3 posts from the same poster one after another just looks bad. I know this is an okay practice in a lot of other forums, but here we prefer that if you post on the same day or just several hours apart, you just modify your very last post if no one has added a reply in all that time. If a day passes and there's still nothing and you require more attention, feel free to add another post. This has been a rule here for several years now and it's worked pretty well. Mainly, it is to prevent the type of things that happen most often: a post with actual content and a help request, and then several minutes or hours later nothing but "bump, bump, bump, anyone here????" which is just wasting forum space.

I don't have any answers to the problem you are experiencing, so I am hoping someone else will come along and offer suggestions.

[steuben]

i'm east of you, and i get a pretty flat connection of ~300 and change to laanx. you might want to do a couple of trace routes when you are getting that bad connection it will point out where the problem lies.

as for configureing the client. short of rebuilding i don't think so. the client has a buildt in setting of five minutes of no info from the server before it will close out. but it does give a specific message when it does that.

but i'm suspecting the computer more then ps itself. right now i've got spyware/virus on the list, followed by an odd software interaction.


Event manager doesn't show anything other than the system starting up over and over. <-- can you elaborate on that?

[Kaithro]

Thanks Stueben your post got me thinking and I decided to run a full check for spyware, viruses, rootkits etc.  My system appears clean, barring anything new and unusual.  I turned on packet logging and checked my security software.  I had about 4 hangs each within seconds of logging in once I was near the crafting stations around Harnquist.  Each time there is no other activity besides psclient.exe receiving packets.  There was only one error (before one hang) where one of the asianet servers (po something) was unreachable.  I also noticed from the following tracert log that it's those servers which seem to add a lot of lag to my connection to the fragnetics server.

D:\Documents and Settings\Ken>tracert 210.193.49.103

Tracing route to kraken.fragnetics.com [210.193.49.103]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  2     9 ms    13 ms     7 ms  rd1wh-ge5-0-0-10.vc.shawcable.net [64.59.158.227
]
  3     7 ms     9 ms     7 ms  rc1wh-ge9-0-0.vc.shawcable.net [66.163.69.109]
  4    12 ms    10 ms    12 ms  rc2wt-pos7-0.wa.shawcable.net [66.163.76.154]
  5    32 ms    31 ms    30 ms  rc1sj-pos0-0.cl.shawcable.net [66.163.77.70]
  6    32 ms    32 ms    33 ms  Gi5-2.gw1.sjc1.asianetcom.net [206.223.116.143]

  7   154 ms   155 ms   166 ms  po12-0.cr1.nrt1.asianetcom.net [202.147.50.134]

  8   238 ms   245 ms   238 ms  po12-0.gw2.sin1.asianetcom.net [202.147.48.121]

  9   247 ms   260 ms   248 ms  Qala-Singapore.gw1.sin1.asianetcom.net [203.192.
169.206]
 10   246 ms   245 ms   245 ms  vlan11-alpha012.qala.com.sg [203.211.159.12]
 11   244 ms   249 ms   247 ms  kraken.fragnetics.com [210.193.49.103]

Trace complete.

There is nothing really suspicious about any of this from what I can see.  I don't really mind that the ping is in the range shown, that is acceptable to me for any internet game.  I've seen it up just over 900ms at worst.  I kind of wonder if those asianet servers are configured to drop the connection if there is a timout of more than a second, but can't prove that.  I'll keep checking logs I guess.

I'm not sure what you mean by elaborating on event log data.  I was just checking it to see if some process was generating exceptions or faults, but nothing was in there that suggested a problem at the operating system level.

I even kind of suspect the video driver in that I recall having an independent GL driver that I used back in the old crystal hunt days.  I went looking for one but since most graphics card manufacturers build GL support into their drivers now it's hard to find one that looks good.

*** EDIT ***
Hmm, I just looked at errorlog.txt in the planeshift directory and found this.  Last update was today a few minutes before I checked it.  Could be nothing but it looks as if the current build is setup to look for source files on Luca's system.  I am tempted to download the source (if it's still available, set everything up in a directory named luca then try again hehe).  The following is a bit of the log, there is more, I cut it down to show the types of messages in it.

<\Luca\Crystal Space\planeshift\src\common\util\psxmlparser.cpp:282 ParseFile> Could not find file: /planeshift/world/bronzedoors/sound.xml
<\Luca\Crystal Space\planeshift\src\common\util\psxmlparser.cpp:282 ParseFile> Could not find file: /planeshift/world/npcroom1/sound.xml
<\Luca\Crystal Space\planeshift\src\common\util\psxmlparser.cpp:282 ParseFile> Could not find file: /planeshift/world/npcroom2/sound.xml
<\Luca\Crystal Space\planeshift\src\common\util\psxmlparser.cpp:282 ParseFile> Could not find file: /planeshift/world/npcroom_corr/sound.xml
<\Luca\Crystal Space\planeshift\src\client\psclientdr.cpp:237 psClientDR::HandleStatsUpdate> Stat request failed because CelClient not ready for 2644
<\Luca\Crystal Space\planeshift\src\client\psclientdr.cpp:237 psClientDR::HandleStatsUpdate> Stat request failed because CelClient not ready for 2644
<\Luca\Crystal Space\planeshift\src\client\psclientdr.cpp:196 psClientDR::HandleDeadReckon> Got DR message for unknown entity 2620.