I have to give Phil (Tastes Like Burning) full credit for pointing me to this solution yesterday. I’ll fall short of saying he saved my life, but that he sure saved me a lot of money avoiding my toons to a new server. He referred me to Doomilias’ site A View From Behind.
I knew that there was something fishy with a recent WoW patch, but I had no proof. It messed up my computer in general with those BSoDs with WoW, Media Player, and who knows what else video-related that I hadn’t discovered. I have been hopping mad at having to reboot my computer and immediately load WoW at sign-on in order to successfully play.
Things took another turn recently, as the lag on Silvermoon has made playing as a paladin unbearable. With the constant dancing around my consecration, sealing, judging, and healing while grinding, the last thing I needed was a 2 second delay in my spells. My latency was posted as 230-350ms, but the delay was much more than that. Sometimes I had to hit a seal several times to get a response, and I’ve almost developed carpal tunnel syndrome from spamming my judging key.
Apparently there is this thing called Nagle’s algorithm that puts your commands into a queue of packets to send to the server until there are enough packets to warrant a transfer. What that means for casting spells is that a single keystroke often isn’t enough information to see a response in-game. Moving is fine, because you hold down a key that transmits rather soon after you start moving, but even that was herky-jerky.
Blame it on Blizzard again, folks. In patch 2.3, they started using Nagle’s, but when the problems arose from it, they “fixed” it in patch 2.3.2. I say that in quotes because they simply removed the code from the game and their servers, but didn’t tell your computer to stop using Nagle’s. My suspicions and symptoms were correct, because as soon as I downloaded and installed FasterPing and re-booted my machine, the problems were completely erased. Just for you, I’ve placed a copy on my server for queue-less downloading.
Bottom line, before shelling over $25 for a paid character transfer due to lag, you owe it to yourself to turn off Nagle’s algorithm using whatever method you want. This is just an easy one.
Now if only the darn BSoD will go away, because the BIOS stuff didn’t work and my RAM voltage appears to be lower than my motherboard goes. I’m at a loss there, so I’m going to save up for new RAM. I just don’t know why it didn’t do it for the first 6 weeks.