12/02 Realm Performance

Some highly populated realms, as well as some realms in highly populated Battlegroups, are currently experiencing performance issues during peak playing hours, which, depending on the realm, can occur both inside and outside instances. This is caused primarily by high concurrent Icecrown Citadel activity, the start of Arena Season 8, the release of the new Vault of Archavon boss encounter and the “Love is in the Air” seasonal event.

To help address some of these issues, we’ve applied a hotfix to optimise certain database requests during the weekly maintenance, in addition to a variety of other related adjustments. We will continue to monitor the affected realms and will be making further adjustments to continually improve performance where possible. We know the performance issues have been a frustrating inconvenience for the players on these realms -- we very much appreciate your patience while we implement additional short- and long-term solutions.

If you are experiencing lag, we need to know:

What realm are you experiencing severe lag on?

What days and dates was this experienced on?

What time or between which times on those days was the latency most severe?

Where exactly were you in the game? Were you in an instance (raid or dungeon), in Lake Wintergrasp, Dalaran or just other random outside world areas?

Finally, how do you describe the effect of the lag? For example, a lot of previous feedback described delayed casting times on abilities for both players and bosses. Other feedback has included unresponsive NPCs or delays after accessing items in the bank or mail. Please try to be as specific and descriptive as you can.

We need to make it clear that if you do submit feedback to us, this is not a wasted effort on your behalf. It really does help us a lot, and the feedback we have passed on for investigation is held in high regard for how much it helps to track the issues down.

While we apologise for the frustration latency causes, we also thank you kindly for helping with submitting constructive feedback.

Q u o t e:
In any case can we please just use this button instead of these crazy detailed posts? Why did you add that "Report lag" button if it's completely useless?

These reports are not seen as "crazy" to us at all, and are in fact seen as the some of the best reports that our technical teams have looked at (I'm almost quoting their words exactly). We would not ask for more feedback if we didn't need it -- that would be completely unhelpful for all involved.

Q u o t e:
However, your options provided there are lacking. Sometimes everything lags, loot/chat/spells/abilities, but your report lag option only let us choose one.

Please re-read our posts. We are not asking for you to use the Report Lag button. We are asking for people to post here, in this thread, more of the kind of useful and constructive feedback that people have kindly given to us in previous weeks.

Thank you for the great response so far.

Q u o t e:
[b]And if this helps in any way, this is a trace route of the server IP:

[pre]Tracing route to 80-239-149-20.customer.teliacarrier.com [80.239.149.20]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

Though our Technical Support team asks for this kind of data, we (the Community Team) do not need them for the report we collate. Thanks though.

Thanks again for the feedback -- this is very useful. In regards to questions about how useful this is, or statements suggesting "surely they don't need this feedback" -- I assure you we do need it and it is useful. Thanks again all.

We just want to say that we appreciate the time you've taken to report latency. We've seen a drop in the last couple of weeks in the reports of latency and we are hopeful that the efforts we have made have played a part in that.

But if you are still experiencing latency, we still would like to hear from you. Please don't hesitate to leave your feedback here, following the suggested format -- it is very helpful for us as it ensures our technical staff are kept fully informed about people's experiences while playing on our realms.

Thanks again to everyone who has taken a few minutes to post to this thread.