Ok, i tried to find solutions for this problem i have many times, but i still didn't come out with a working one.
The problem i have is the following:
Whenever i need to zone to somewhere which involves a new zone loading, it seems like the client needs to acknowledge many times the fact that it needs to load a new zone. It takes always up to 30 seconds before the loading bar appears.
It bothers me because all the group and friend i play with can zone instantly, and they always need to wait me.
During the game i never experience LAG, i always have a nice ping and can do everything i'm supposed to do. The only time in which that problem manifests itself is prior zoning / porting somewhere.
The loading time is short, i mean from when the loading bar appears to whenever i will be able to play again.

My OS is Vista 64 (i know, not the best one for playing, but still i don't have any problem during game and i can run many other more recent games just fine), quadcore AMD cpu 2.2ghz, 4gb ram.

I doubt it's something related to harddisk issues. I defragged it, ran scandisk, nothing new. Loading times are ok, even WHILE playing (i don't get any stuttering caused by loading, i have very little lag which warns me of incoming enemy players because i feel that the computer is loading their skins, but that is normal for a huge amount of other players.
Created exceptions on antivirus (avira), disabled software firewall (comodo personal firewall), nothing here too.

Someone advised me to use ProcessMonitor. I did, but i can't figure a thing, lol.

Last thing i want to try is see if by opening some ports on my router it would help my client to dialog faster with the server during zoning acknowledgements.
Sooo... I searched the forum and i found different indications on the ports that needs to be open.
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6650 says 10300tcp 10400udp
viewtopic.php?p=123975#p123975 says 4-5 different things.

Soo.. Any ideas, any help, anything, besides telling me which are the ports i should open?
Thank you in advance

Try change Motherboard driver and use Windows drivers or if not installed try install the specific, as I just say you sems a slow disk problem.
What kind of model are your motherboard?
Hard disk? Sata? 1 / 2?
Another try can be test writing/reading velocity of Hdd in this case whit/whitout specific driver.

It is -NOT- a disk problem. Otherwise i would lag just anywhere in the game and with any other game too.

is the game on the same physical hard drive than your operating system?

epo wrote:is the game on the same physical hard drive than your operating system?

Yep

You might want to change that. I have the same problems, sometimes the loadingscreen won't appear for so long that i ld in between. I don't know where that comes from or what enables this behaviour but it is for sure annoying when everyone else is loading faster than you do.

Problem is that i have just one physical HD with two logical partitions. Don't think that it will help moving all daoc files on d: , right?
Still, i find it difficult to believe it could be that one the problem...

Anyone knows about the tcp/udp ports to open, just to delete that from the possible issues list?

No, that will change nothing because you are still limited to the r/w speed of your only HD.

I can assure you that opening or forwarding ports like the udp port 10300 will change nothing in terms of faster loading times, etc.

clean install a win7 32-bit system. do all windows updates. with your 4gb ram there's no use of 64-bit anyway.
i'm pretty sure it's just a software/driver problem on vista base. rubbish system etc.

and last but not least, the daoc client only supports one core, so even dualcore is a waste (for daoc) and can cause problems.
BUT the client does profit from a single high cpu clock and 2,2 ghz is pretty low, even for daoc - very cpu intensive game.

forget the tcp/udp ports - this is not your problem.

Ah yes, in most BIOS's the Hyperthreading is activated per standard. Hyperthreading is a cpu feature used by server administrators to logically divide 1 core into 2 virtual cores. So given that you own a 4 core cpu with a frequency of 2,8ghz, 1 of the now 8 cores is limited to 1,4ghz. DAOC, like many other games can only run on one core.

Now if you remember at which time computers with 1,4ghz cpus were being used, you can imagine the rest.

Deactivate Hyperthreading/Intel iVT in your BIOS and you will fully benefit from the power of 4x 2,8Ghz (or whatever you have) again or maybe for the very first time.

epo wrote:Ah yes, in most BIOS's the Hyperthreading is activated per standard. Hyperthreading is a cpu feature used by server administrators to logically divide 1 core into 2 virtual cores. So given that you own a 4 core cpu with a frequency of 2,8ghz, 1 of the now 8 cores is limited to 1,4ghz. DAOC, like many other games can only run on one core.

Now if you remember at which time computers with 1,4ghz cpus were being used, you can imagine the rest.

Deactivate Hyperthreading/Intel iVT in your BIOS and you will fully benefit from the power of 4x 2,8Ghz (or whatever you have) again or maybe for the very first time.

CPU-Z report wrote:-------------------------
CPU-Z version 1.48
-------------------------

Processors Map
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Number of processors 1
Number of threads 4

Processor 0
-- Core 0
-- Thread 0
-- Core 1
-- Thread 0
-- Core 2
-- Thread 0
-- Core 3
-- Thread 0


Processors Information
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Processor 1 (ID = 0)
Number of cores 4 (max 4)
Number of threads 4 (max 4)
Name AMD Phenom X4 9550
Codename Agena
Specification AMD Phenom(tm) 9550 Quad-Core Processor
Package Socket AM2+ (940)
CPUID F.2.3
Extended CPUID 10.2
Brand ID 10
Core Stepping DR-B3
Technology 65 nm
Core Speed 2200.1 MHz (11.0 x 200.0 MHz)
HT Link speed 1800.1 MHz <<<<<------ YOU MEAN THIS is my real clock speed for one core????
Stock frequency 2200 MHz
Instructions sets MMX (+), 3DNow! (+), SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4A, x86-64
L1 Data cache 4 x 64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64-byte line size
L1 Instruction cache 4 x 64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64-byte line size
L2 cache 4 x 512 KBytes, 16-way set associative, 64-byte line size
L3 cache 2 MBytes, 32-way set associative, 64-byte line size
...
(skip)

(check the red markings up here)

Won't deactivating HT influence all the other things too, like bus transfer, ram speed etc?

Let's put it this way: with the hyperthreading technology you can speed up things by up to 40%, for example if you play a lot of games that support multicore CPUs. When I got my quadcore in 2009 there was only game on the market that would be running and dividing stuff onto 2 different cores. It was a racing game..

Here's a very detailed report about multicores in gaming: http://www.gamestar.de/hardware/praxis/ ... ielen.html but it's german. (google chrome can translate it for you)

However when you only do facebook, emails and daoc you should consider deactivating it and profit from the fact that windows will put your daoc process onto one of your 4 cores and have the other processes run on the remaining 3 cores. Thus allowing you to listen to music, watch porn, surf the forums etc. while your game is running smoothly in the background or on your big screen.

PS: You should also deactivate AMD-V(irtualization Technology)

However when you only do facebook, emails and daoc you should consider deactivating it and profit from the fact that windows will put your daoc process onto one of your 4 cores and have the other processes run on the remaining 3 cores. Thus allowing you to listen to music, watch porn, surf the forums etc. while your game is running smoothly in the background or on your big screen.

PRO!

I have exactly the same issues, did you found the reason?
would be great to hear a Solution.

Huddel wrote:I have exactly the same issues, did you found the reason?
would be great to hear a Solution.

Can't find where to disable hyperthreading in my BIOS. Don't think it's possible, not even by manual overclocking at ~0% to just disable something. Other than that, i'm not going to reinstall a whole OS just for one game when everything else works (i'm not saing works GOOD, just works. I know XP or 7 would be better).
If i'll try with something else i'll keep this post updated, and i please beg anyone else who has something in mind to do the same.

BTW thanks again EPO for your big help and explanations. Should you find another bit of anything that could help me or anyone else, please, share ^_^

/hug