I fixed ALL of my raid lag but now I cannot parse fights :(

I was having horrendous, unplayable lag in TOV raids. Come to find out it had absolutely nothing to do with my computer, graphics card, showing or hiding players/npc/target circles and other graphics settings in game, etc. It had EVERYTHING to do with chat options 100%!! Other than raidsay, event messages, random emotes, I pretty much set all of the ones possible to HIDE and that 100% fixed my game and lag in TOV raids. I say this for 2 reasons. 1) To hopefully help someone else going through these problems and 2) Has anyone figured out which ones exactly contribute to the massive lag because I would really like to parse fights again and that is the one drawback to what I have done. My parses are now pretty much useless

can't we have our cake and eat it too?

There is no individual log line that causes problems but the number of them that get generated on raids is the issue. If you are just looking at dps you could turn off healing, misses and other things that do not relate to dps to see if that helps.

Your AV software is trying to scan your log file, in real time. When you're raiding, there is a LOT of changes happening to that log file every second. The slower your drive... the harder this is to do. Even using an m.2 SSD it's going to cause some lag.. an HDD, it's brutal.

You need to exclude the EverQuest logs directory from your AV software. For most people, that's Windows Defender, and it's easy to do. Click Start, type Virus, and you'll see Virus & Threat Protection - click this. Click Manage Settings...

Scroll down to Exclusions and click Add or remove exclusions. Click Add an Exclusion and add your EverQuest logs directory.

I blame inter-server sales spam!

Also the size of the log file matters, it takes longer to append a line to a larger file than a smaller file. There's various means to do it automatically, but you'll want to be deleting/moving/renaming the log file for each character maybe once a week or so.

I'm going to try this and yeah i'm one of the lucky ones i guess to be using the newest kind of fastest SSD there is and to respond to the other person I do and always did keep my log file very small as well. Even since I made this post I've been messing around with the settings and I think it might even be mostly the amount of spells casted and damage shield messages flying around but have much more testing to do to see if it can be pinpointed to one or two main things or as the other person mentioned maybe its just a cumulative effect of all of them not 100% sure yet

One trick I use, I have the majority of spell damage, melee, DoT's and what not all go to the same spam window I keep minimized. Every couple of events I just click on the minimized chat box and type /clear, that usually clears up the lag for me. I notice if I don't do that after a couple of events I start to lag, the minute I do the /clear the lag goes away.

You need to be very careful with expanding a minimized window that has a lot of spam going to it as it can crash you if it gets to much text in it.

That’s so Everquest, lol.

In my experience, I've had great results in not minimizing my spam window. I just keep it small and hidden behind another window - out of sight. Along with the Windows exception and small log files, this made the most difference for me.
Conq

Oh yeah, never minimize the spam window. That's killer. Put it in a tab that you don't see. Just don't minimize it or you'll ... be.... lagging... all... to... hell!

With tabs you can just put in into one you don't have to look at and just ignore it from then on out

Yeah, if I unexpand it I instantly lock up/crash lol. You can just click the minimized window without actually expanding it and the clear will go to that window to remove all the spam/clear up lag.

/clearall works too and you dont have to open the spam window to use it. Just make sure someone didnt just send you a tell or you lose it.

I might try leaving it small/open behind another chat window, I'll try it like that this weekend and see if it makes a difference.

I have an m.2 ssd and made sure my av didn't scan anything eq related. Still lag hard if I try and parse everything, looking for solutions to the problem. Someone suggested running your log files on a ram drive?

There has to be something else going on as I have a standard SSD and almost all logging turned on with no lag issues.

Another source of lag that I've seen is in game audio triggers. They're not very efficient and will cause lag attempting to parse every line multiple times (for multiple triggers) during raids. Disable ones you're not using, or just delete them all and use GINA instead.

Some? I bought essentially the fastest one on the market at the time (samsung 970 pro) and I couldnt move in raids until I made the exception in my AV.

You can manage different "sets" of ingame ATs(like one for each expansion or each zone), instead of having 50+ ATs "on" all the time. You need to split them up into different folders in your AT-directory for it to work.
Disabling the ATs you don't use in the set, is also a good idea if the set is large.

Ingame AT's have one advantage performance-wise compared to GINA: they don't need to go through the file system at all, as they read the in-game chat directly from ram. That means you can disable logging and remove the file-system/ssd bottleneck completely.

Ofc, the trade-off is that it will make parsing impossible...