Visiting and Buffing Friend's Islands Still Causing Lag and Temporary Freezes

[Frii]

So, this issue has been going on for many years and is very frustrating. When you visit the island of a guild member or friend to buff their buildings the Settlers game begins to freeze to the point you can't select or use anything in the game for a few seconds followed by about ten seconds without lag, only to then endlessly repeat the cycle of freezing until you leave.

The more buildings and the more buffs on a visited island the worse it is. This makes it very tedious to try to buff anybody or enjoy visiting islands.

It's about time this lag and freezes were figured out and fixed, it's been many years since it first started. At this point, I'm sure 90% of the players are using computers that far exceed any minimum requirements to run the game, so we know this is caused by faulty Settlers Online game code itself, not our computers.

I have 64 GB of RAM and I notice the game only uses about 1 GB, so it's clearly an issue with the game code.

[Frii]

I underestimated how bad the lag is when buffing friend's islands. Today I timed it with a stopwatch. An average sized island with 300 buildings total and about half or 150 buffed will result in a non-stop pattern of the game totally freezing for 10 seconds, followed by 20 seconds unfrozen. 10 seconds of the game being completely frozen without even being able to move around the map is pretty bad.

At a ratio of waiting 10 seconds frozen to get 20 seconds of gameplay the game is literally completely frozen and unplayable 1/3 of the time.

[Frii]

So, more testing showed these freezes are not graphically related to the buffs animation, as I disabled the animations and the game still has the same consistent pattern of freezing on other people's buffed islands. It's definitely related to buildings and buffs though as the more buffs and buildings an island has the worse the freezes are, so I suspect a bug or poorly coded building buff status code for clients visiting other islands.

[Frii]

Since the Starfall updates, buffing guildmate's and friend's islands with many buffs has become much more laggy and unplayable, even crashing sometimes.

[Frii]

I looked up the history on this issue and was surprised myself to find that it has been ongoing since 2016, eight years! It has improved some, but there was definitely some faulty code added to the game eight years ago resulting in freezes and lag when visiting and buffing the islands of friends with many buildings. Apparently it may have been related to the way stacks of items in the star menu were implemented. This crippling lag has been reported numerous times and many have complained about it over the years and yet it still persists unresolved to this day.

Some of my original reports from 2016:

[Ticket#US-2016050412000075] Horrible Lag Since Star Menu Update
[Ticket#US-2016021212000118] Lag After Star Menu Update

*facepalm*

[Frii]

Crash after visiting several friend's islands searching for Easter event party crashers. The island was lagging badly right before this crash.

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[Frii]

Buffing islands with many buildings is still causing unplayable lag and freezing. This should be a priority fix as it's one of the worst performance issues there is with the game.

[Frii]

[Frii]