Long Client loading time

[Grundy]

Is it just me, or does everyone else get a 2 - 3 minute load time when the map changes, even for servers like MYU that I have played many hours on? Most every match I get in late.

it makes no sense since i should already have the maps eh? Once I get in everything seems ok but that delay is annoying.

[spyder913]

doesn't take anywhere near that long for me...

[]LoL[Harm]

nor me, unless it's a new map, then it may take a 2 minutes tops

not sure whats up there grundy, might want to look around TF2 forums and see if you have map caching disabled or some other advanced tweak you can make

[Hammer]

Me too grundy. Definitely less for maps I've played still a minute or two. I was thinking it was cheapo 1.5 connection here as opposed to the 8.0 connection I have back in G'boro.

[Jammer]

Wow, I'm glad Grundy asked this, because I figured it was just me. I'm definitely seeing the same thing. Sucks to finally get into the game and already be down a CP or the other guy is running back with the Intel.

I'm glad Grundy has agreed to fix this for everyone! :rolly:

[Aasimon]

Have you tried reducing the number of background simultaneous porn downloads?

[]LoL[Harm]

I'll repost a tweak guide that OutZ created on the MyU forums here. After i grab breakfast.

[Grundy]

Just to be clear I am talking about the Loading... screen which goes thru this sequence

Parsing game info...
Server info...
Downloading maps...
Sending Client info...


Ok a lil lunch time testing cuz it "felt" like 2 -3 mins. I connected to 10 servers in my history of violence at lunch time and granted, most were empty. On ave i am getting 30-45 sec load time. For the servers advertised with custom maps I could see they got downloaded and I was loading for 2 minutes. I do not see maps getting downloaded on previous servers.

I tried going thru the full connection and reconnecting to the same server and that didnt change the load time, except for one server where the load time was only 10 sec on re-connect. I would love to get it down to that on all servers.

Ill try timing the map change scenario once I am already playing.

[malkovich]

30-45 seconds sounds about right for me for a joining a server too , map changes maybe sometimes a little faster than that and sometimes just about that long ...

much longer than any other game i have played ...

[Post]

It appears having a custom spray will lengthen your load time, too.

[Allison]

It appears having a custom spray will lengthen your load time, too.

Ah so!

[Morety]

I have custom sprays and I load up pretty quickly.

What's your computer spec's Grundy? Maybe you should use Ally's!

[Allison]

How many sprays do you have, Morety? I wonder if it makes a difference the more you have.

Nevermind. I've been informed that I'm a n00b and you can only have one. :)

[Riddick]

THere is probably alot of factors. I am sure sprays matter since those will need to be uploaded to the server for download to the clients connected to it. Any additional items on the server also need to be checked and downloaded as needed as well.

For instance if the server has some mod tool, sound files, and other things like that that are custom then when you connect the server needs to check those files on your local computer to make sure you have them and they are the right date. That takes time and then if it has to download them there is more time. So each server will vary widely in its loadtime as well. The multi-kill stuff on MyU is a good example I think.

[Grundy]

The sprays are 1KB so I doubt thats it.

Our rigs are the same about 2-3 years old. Could prolly use more RAM.

AMD 3400 Athlon 64 2.00GHz with 1GB RAM
GeForce 7600 GS with 512MB (AGP 8x)

[Post]

It's not so much the side of the sprays as much as it is the server has a "when I get around to it" mentality to load it up.

[Morety]

We're playing on the same server, and it's pretty fast for myself.

I think some extra ram might help. 1 gig isn't a lot these days. With my rig I have 2 gigs of ram and it's where I'm bottlenecking. I have 2 more gigs I could toss in, but my m0b0 won't take them for some reason.

[Muadi]

For the load times... when we d/l a new map on the mYu server, does it get stored for later use? Have to d/l again the next time we hit the map?

[Morety]

It should be stored in your "cache". With UT, it would stay in for a user-designated number of days.

[Hammer]

It should stay. One thing UT also did was throttle down the amount of bandwidth you were allowed to use to download maps/sounds, etc. I'm guessing TF2 is the same. You don't want the server to lag every time someone connects.

[Riddick]

If TF2 is anything like the Half-Life and its mods then anything and everything you download stays with you. When I got rid of my computer before the last one my Half-Life folder was HUGE.