SOLVED FOR ME: Verizon DNS server was causing the issue, I changed mine to 1.1.1.1 (cloudflare public DNS) for primary and 8.8.8.8 (Google primary DNS) as secondary and I have no problems at all, hope this can help someone else
Same as so many people, I am having incredible lag spikes that are making the game unplayable. When I say lag I mean that all the mobs on screen will stop moving for a few seconds then all will at once, looting takes over 8 seconds from click to bend, firing a skill off sees it go off 10 seconds later and on my hunter the pet moves well after the shot even when sent before. I have run into issues like this on other games, usually due to resource hogging by an errant process or a giant memory leak.12672
I started playing again about 3 weeks ago after a very long break, everything was fine until 3 days ago when the occasional lag spikes and long loading times became permanent.
I have done quite a few things to narrow the issue down.
Computer: I am on a decent rig with 16g of RAM, I7, Win10 , 250g SSD, 1TB NVME, 1660 TI. I made sure all drivers are completely up to date and changed the install location between both drives, redownloaded the client 6 times now (thank god for fast internet). When I initially change the install location or redownload I get decent response for a few minutes and then the lag spikes start again.
Hardware monitoring shows the CPU is at nominal temps and nothing is throttling, the GPU is underutilized as is the CPU.
Network: I ran a packet sniffer on the router (a Nighthawk, fully updated) it shows everything moving as it should through my network and 23ms Latency that occasionally spikes to 80ms. When I check the traffic from in game it frequently jumps to 400-500ms even though other tested traffic on the router itself is still going at 23ms, this infers the slow down happens on the return trip from the server. My network usage never tops 40% with the game and testing software running so I know it isn’t that, concurrent tests show the connection lag is isolated to WOW traffic, all other traffic moves with no problem and is being detected from the router and the PC.
Hardware: OK, so as a person who manages a Data Center I understand that the simplest tips are the ones technical people tend to skip but rebooting and those types of things work 9 times out of 10 so I followed every step you all lay out in the numerous other posts complaining about the same issue and NONE of them had an effect past a few minutes of play. I decided to take it a step further and replace both the SSD and NVME drive I had installed, tried a new Kingston enterprise SSD that I tested first and confirmed good, a U.2 interface NVME drive instead of the M.2 and a brand new 7200k 500g mechanical drive I threw through SMART testing and confirmed good from the factory. I did fresh installs of the game on each drive (that makes 5 drives total this game has been on) and on all 3 it was the same, game operated fine for up to an hour then started to lag again.
Software: I isolated WOW into its’ own environment with ONLY essential Windows services running and while the lag was slightly less it was still hard to accomplish anything in game.
My question is this - is this just the way it is? if so I will uninstall and call the money I have spent so far a wash but I really want to know if this is just the state of the game for some people. Perhaps you are experiencing micro spikes on your rack switches, that kind of link soak is difficult to get around without new hardware in the DC and I know how prohibitive that can be. Maybe it is just a fault in the code that effects some users and not others or it is just a routing issue outside of either of our networks and thus you all can’t do anything about it. I really just want to know if I should even bother trying to resolve this because ESO, Warframe, Cyberpunk, Valheim, etc… are all running just fine on the same machine, I even ran WOW and Warframe at the same time to see which traffic got effected, neither did but WOW lag spiked while Warframe was butter.