PTR Pop-Up | Focus on Freezing Issue | Has Ended

Round 2 of Testing from me:

Firebird Mirror Images GR90:

WW-Barb GR125 (beginning):

Edit: would love to add my settings image (since i forgot it in the first post), but apparently i am not allowed…
Edit2: https://imgur.com/a/kR6bWBw (thanks to Meteorblade)

Why would you play hardcore diablo 3? The game has been lagging, freezing, disconnecting, etc… for years.

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I consider myself lucky to be one of those players who rarely experience the issues reported by others. However, I do experience some of the issues occasionally.

For Phase 2, I left my Sound Options set to 128 Channels. At the end of my gaming session last night on the Live server, my Desktop App updated the PTR. I went to bed early and woke up early this morning.

Saturday, August 7, 2021 4:55 AM EDT

  • I did a fresh PTR Copy.
  • I checked that my Sound Options were still set for 128 Channels.

  1. I ran a T16 Rift. No issues.
  2. On the way to Kill Siegebreaker, I experienced slight lag at the first Demonic Hell Bearer. (Less than a second).
  3. Ran a Greater Rift 84. No issues.
  4. Ran a second GR84. No issues.

5:56 AM EDT

  1. End game session.

Note: I consider this an improvement. I usually have to set my Sound Options to 64 or even 32 Channels to avoid any lag or freezing.

Here is my documentation:

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It’s way better with the new PTR Phase 2 patch. I ran several GR120-130 with my GoD DH and my Firebird Wizard. No visible lags yet.

So far i have noticed in the d3debug.txt a single FMOD error with 200ms time. Previously it was 3 * 3100ms.

I will continue testing later today and i will post my log if i notice something.

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Ok new day of testing after being up till 2am EST.

Played GoD DH in a GR110 with one freeze up about one second long.

GoD DH GR110 D3Debug.txt

Tempest Rush Monk on GR110 one freeze about a half second long.

Tempest Rush Monk GR110 D3Debug.txt

The freeze is not happening on every GR I run.
It seems to happen every once and a while. And only for a half a second to almost a second. Still annoying while playing!

Whirlwind Barb #3 GR110 D3Debug.txt

Hi,

One GRift 120 run (also with a WW barb) on a 9-year old machine… much smoother than what I get on live. On live, I get ½ sec freezes or stutter that makes it difficult to maintain the whirling… every 10 seconds or so. This time, I did not perceive any freezes. The D3Debug file does contain a few FMOD errors but these do not seem to cause any visible issues. All in all, a most satisfying run on a PC I thought almost dead.

D3Debug.txt : D3Debug.txt for PTR Pop-Up - Pastebin.com
Video Settings : https://i.imgur.com/ZmFp10w.jpg
Sound Settings : https://i.imgur.com/wmrAjVC.jpg

Keep up the good work !!

Just have my first 1s lag on solo Firebird Wizard.

Log
Settings

2021.08.07 22:42:31.651714600	FMOD Error sound not ready in 212.99 ms
2021.08.07 22:42:31.854438500	FMOD Error sound not ready in 202.31 ms
2021.08.07 22:42:32.055230300	FMOD Error sound not ready in 200.40 ms
2021.08.07 22:42:32.381144000	FMOD Error sound not ready in 204.57 ms
2021.08.07 22:42:32.584046600	FMOD Error sound not ready in 202.46 ms
2021.08.07 22:42:32.786101300	FMOD Error sound not ready in 201.64 ms

Have got my first lag on solo Immportal KIng Wizard at GR100 at blue elite looks like Dragons. Dont know english name of monsters.
Log

The most interesting part is that i cannot reproduce this problem with my GoD DH now. I am using a lot of Area Damage and i have tried GR125s, regular rifts and even bounties for an hour. No lags and no FMOD errors in the d3debug.txt

This is very strange because in the previous PTR i got lags with the same DH hero.

For what it’s worth, I captured a memory dump at the start of a frozen Greater rift and the windbg !analyze -v said the following:
*** WARNING: Unable to verify checksum for fmodex64.dll

I realise it’s not very interesting but without any debug symbols I can’t do much more. :grin:

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This effectively solves the freezing problem!!

Like the others, I see progress on the FMOD issues. I have been unable to reproduce them after the 8/6 PTR patch as I can on the live US server. However, at least for some of us this is not the only issue causing freezes. File sizes exceeded the limit for pastebin. The included WinMTR data is to the PTR server based on it’s IP within d3debug.

PTR d3debug.txt: PTR_ClientSocket_disconnect_8-7-21@2130
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jOgESe3XmD7kIwIH8v9hEfXuM7KpIIox/view?usp=sharing

PTR d3debug.txt: PTR_ClientSocket_disconnect_8-8-21@0021
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sK7pdUd-sXP_WGvgIrZPdtv3prSrig3c/view?usp=sharing

WinMTR_PTR_capture_on_disconnect_8-7-21@2130.txt
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n_y1t2z0rWthbjE1RyP-SdXyoQucAWqH/view?usp=sharing

WinMTR_PTR_8-7_to_8-8_4hour_capture.txt
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KHIfMQVkhcYqXrEqug0zHS21KheHL_sM/view?usp=sharing

TLDR for these two d3debugs is

|2021.08.08 00:21:04.269190800|ClientSocket Disconnect|
|2021.08.08 00:21:04.269327400|UIStartup_ClientDisconnected msg=The game connection has been lost: your client has been disconnected from the server.|

…a network disconnect. Watching WinMTR (output attached), latency spikes at the time of the freezing, starting with the first hop into the Blizzard infrastructure and becoming quite severe (I observed up to 900+ms worst case in my attached 4 hour sample, during which I experienced disconnect events twice) in the second hop.

Between me and the Blizzard/Equinix demarc, my worst sample over 4 hours was 22ms with an average of 3ms. During these issues, I’m able to continuously access resources from the rest of the Internet without issue, including continuously streaming media for which a disconnect would be immediately noticeable.

The connectivity issues that I’ve experienced can present in at least 3 different ways in d3debug depending on the length and severity of the spike:

  1. No error logged at all.
    Client side: Everything locks up exactly like the FMOD issue, then resumes after 5-15 seconds-ish.

  2. recv() failed
    OR

  3. ClientSocket Disconnect
    Client side: After locking up for a time, the client is forcibly disconnected after timing out.

I can reproduce these issues periodically just by standing in town on the PTR or on the live server and periodically preventing myself from going AFK in game. Be advised it can be 2 hours or sometimes even more between incidents. Other times it may be just minutes.

As an experiment, I tried running both the live and PTR clients at once. During the network issues I experienced, sometimes one was disconnected and the other survived. Other times, both were hit with a freeze or disconnect. Just depends if the client was lucky enough to survive the latency spike.

I really appreciate you guys finally taking this issue seriously and communicating with us. Please pass on our thanks to the engineers and devs. I hope this gives you some more items to consider.

Edit: Here’s another WinMTR demonstrating a 4399ms worst sample latency at that same device ae1-br02-eqla1.as57976.net
WinMTR_capture_on_disconnect_8-8-21@0225.txt
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1du-DQbiLAL16GQTdrjFhEGASDyB8xxDA/view?usp=sharing

7 Likes

Because I’m used to play like that, in previous seasons that wasn’t such problem for me, but in the season 23 and 24 it became worst thing to get…

The deep freeze seems to happen very frequently on me when playing (or playing with) a Firebird Mirror Image Wiz on wifi network

I have an identical PC as my wife’s and we play side by side; The only difference is that I use wifi and she uses wired network. when playing with another friend who uses a firebird wiz, I have significant lags and freezes while she doesn’t. I also had bad freezes very frequently when I was playing firebird myself.

Hope that helps a bit for you to reproduce this issue.

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Hey everyone! This weekend, we received so much valuable information from the files and feedback on the Freeze issue. As of this morning, the team is preparing to jump into “Phase 3” of the PTR Pop-up and publish another build update with the intent to improve the current issues we’re reading into now.

At the moment, players can pause from sharing feedback and stay tuned for updates on the new build version coming. We’re very grateful for all the support and will keep you posted.

11 Likes

Happy Monday! Thank you for the update. Good luck with the new build, I’m excited for phase 3.

Finally, even if it was late, but I’ve done some testing (couldn’t done it earlier)… For now, it was acceptable lagging, FMOD sound ready after: was normally at 20ms, but at lag spikes it was from 100 to 200 ms. But for certain, those 200ms wasn’t able to kill my HC char, as I could still battle, but all those lag spikes was due to the Elites and other bosses (yes, I thought about that connections, as I usually died in such way), the more elites were at the same time, the bigger was lag spike, but in rare cases it could be due to the only one elite…
Edit: let see, what changes will be in the Version 3, as I’ve prepared for the full test (to the limit)…