Massive tell, channel, and zoning lag on AB server

I've just had 8s lag on chat on vox just now -- probaly safe to assume it lags as well in general

Can't you just rebuild a new server, shutdown AB, and restore the server, if we face a week down time, or whatever, it would be for the best.

The Setup

New Monk on AB (named smashpaw)
New Monk on VOX (named smashpaw)

Both sitting in Tutorial.

Made a hotkey with the following lines
/1 test spam 1
/1 test spam 2
/1 test spam 3
/1 test spam 4
/1 test spam 5

Results

Ping on VOX 160 ms
Ping on AB 30 ms

Test run 14/06/2017 20:00:00 GMT
This is an off peak period, most raiding guilds are done for the week.

Both characters were used from the same PC.

Both SERVERS had what appears to be some restriction on how many lines you can spam, and occasionally I would get a single line of /1 test spam 1 and no further lines from that hotkey click.

Vox consistently pasted at least that single line.
AB would work similar to Vox for periods but then had periods where nothing would appear on screen at all even after several clicks of the hotkey, followed by many lines appearing at once after about 10-15 seconds.

I don't know what the actual server addresses are but I am open to running trace routes to the servers if a dev would like to PM me the IPs. Honestly though given the stable ping to AB it feels more like an internal problem with AB connecting to one of your other servers, possibly chat/login servers in the US?

A bit over 10s chat lag at 18:47 UTC on both vox and AB.
The message didn't go through at the exact same time (usually everyone on the server will see their message arrive at the same time after the same big silence; so it means the "holes" are not the same between servers) but I wouldn't bet that lag isn't related as it's not been lagging much but happened at roughly the same time.

Bit later tonight (19:49 UTC) a bad spike on AB - over 30s - but vox is crisp and clear. The spikes really don't look related. Is there a population spike at a particular hour on vox? Will try over the weekend.

Ping on AB 40ms at 9:45pm (towards the end of a raid night, if we had been raiding tonight)
Ping in Vox 256ms.

No lag currently on either.

I agree with the people above that this isnt a ping issue. We can be suffering really bad lag and disconnects with near normal ping.

I think there are some people who do suffer even more severely and disconnect frequently on laggy nights. Maybe thats more connected to the errors we see a lot of during login (a timeout has occurred, and an unknown error). I also find if Im switching toons and do a fast camp, more often than not, I end up having to kick the toon from the server before logging the next one in.

As an aside, AB is now upto pick zone 21 for old seb and I havent heard any complaints there, either in gen chan or from guild.

Thread started in Feb. First dev response in June (and it was a fluff "continuing to look into it"...).

I no longer play EQ. I quit 18 months ago - DUE TO LAGGY/BUGGY SERVER that had been ongoing for months with no meaningful DBG responses. I didn't want to move server / guilds, so quit instead and it was the best thing I did and now have new hobbies to fill my time, although I occasionally pop by the guild forums to see what people are up to.

Realistically though, it's the only thing that matters. If people whinge but keep on paying then the bean counters know that reducing the cost of servers and overloading the VMs was the right thing to do! The ONLY thing that counts ultimately is hurting the profit margins, either directly (quitting) or indirectly (bad publicity or the realistic thread of quitting).

You don't have to go the whole hog of quitting immediately though; an ultimatum of "if it's not fixed by X, I cancel the sub" from half the player base would very quickly escalate the server from being "unhappy residents" to "oh *halfling* it's an uprising" status.

Slow going learning languages in your group for the defiant charm item when group chat drops out for 1-4 minutes at a time...

/sigh

and AB down again

Crash! AB down.

Lets not loose site of this not only being about chat lag. AB goes down frequently and the server itself lags too.

There's more at issue where than just the chat lag Dev's!

Agreed, the chat lag is annoying, but the rest of the server issues are far worse to me. Sometimes it takes minutes to zone, or minutes for characters to even show up on char select on AB. Mobs warping, lag running into KoS mobs when you wanted to stop short, etc... server lag shows up on alot more than than just chat, but chat is easily visible so it gets a lot of attention.

And of course AB being completely down.... but I guess its not laggy when its down.

THIS.

Has been my guess since the very beginning of this whole issue.
That the chat-system works independently from the actual game server or at least involves some off-server component is evident when "the chat system is temporarily unavailable" and "you will be notified when it is avaiable again".

Perhaps the whole problem is something as "trivial" as a rotten router somewhere internal that cases too much packetloss from AB to chat-server.
Or perhaps, if they'd re-think that "split" and put (a copy of?) the chat-system onto the AB cluster itself, the problem would "disapear" - at least for all AB-internal chat.
Who needs the spammers anyways that are spamming general with X-server-tells?

We should get compensated for this server problems seriously, along with extened double xp,rare ect for the server. At this point should just shut server down and make a new server for us or xfer us it's the least you could do.

Server been up for like 1 hour 10 min. And first 30 min was ok, then came time where zoning took like 5 min, now its appears to be back to "normal".

Not holding my breath here, but will be interesting to see if they manage to find a solution before my account runs out . Has been a good time in general though

another day with AB unstable lag and zoning how long will it take for you to decide to close this server and xfer us

Yep, been noticing lag since I got online around 4.30pm UK. Sometimes it's ok, but sometimes it's in the 10-15 second delay before things appear on chat channels / tells / etc.

Quiet laggy atm...dropping a task takes several minutes. Zoning is unstable, meaning 2 of 3 toons zone (slowly) while the third after a long wait is punted to evac spot because the zone denied entry

It's laggy as hell again. Zoning makes trip from PoK to Sebilis take 15min

Today lag is even heavier than other raid days. First people ancounced to quit the game until lag is fixed. I want to play. I still hope this is getting fixed.