I was running wow and windows on the same ssd with no issues before wow became too big so dropped it onto the regular SATA drive. It was way slower to load game content so bought a second ssd and dropped it on there by it’s self.
There was zero issues… nota one with the final setup until about the time of the
original post when it ground to a screen locking halt. The set up was just fine
but something was changed that caused our problem and I don’t believe it was all of us.
I am the the 2nd poster but my avatar changes with every realm change when posting here now. The dxdiag codes from the original forum were extended into our posts making them difficult to read.
I’ve done a bit more experimentation on this, and what I figure we all have in common is that we have characters on multiple realms. It has nothing to do with hardware.
Did and experiment, deleted DBCache.bin file (the entire Cache folder actually) and also my Addons folder as to remove Addons from the equation.
Upon launching Wow, the Cache folder was was recreated, and a number of tmp files were created in ADB/enUS sub-folder. Upon closing Wow, the DBCache.bin file was recreated. It’s size was approx. 3,500KB. Note I did not log into any characters.
I proceeded to switch realms for every one in which a character existed. The size of the DBCache.bin file grew by about 3,500KB with every realm switch. I then switched to a realm with no characters, bringing up the character creation screen, hit back and switched again. The size of the DBCache.bin file still increased by the same amount, even though no characters existed, nor were any created.
So if you’re an Altoholic (like me) or you wanted to log onto every realm with a character in order to get the Anniversary Gift and Achievement (like I did), what you ended up doing is growing the size of the DBCache.bin file to a size that brings to light the bug Wow has in reading this file (see my previous post).
If you limit your playtime to a single realm (or two) the DBCache.bin file stays relatively small and you never notice. If you bounce around many realms, the DBCache.bin file is going to grow over time, and load times will get slower and slower, the more realms you bring up.
So short term solution, till they figure out why they are reading this file in such small chunks, is just to delete the Cache\ADB\enUS\DBCache.bin file when it gets larger that 10,000KB. Or just play on a single realm.
I have some characters on Kilrog that I haven’t logged into in months. All my other characters are on Thrall. I have only logged into Thrall since I started trying to troubleshoot this.
My DBCache.bin file is only 3700KB.
I have the character select screen hang and the loading screen hang.
Thank you so much for doing this. I would have never even thought of it. It does look like they are finally taking us seriously, and realizing it is something in the software and not our machines.
Thanks for the admission finally. My game is on a SSD and has been for several years. Perhaps you need to investigate what has changed with the WoW client to cause this issue as nothing has changed at my end. Perhaps this needs to be escalated up to a dev?
I have this exact issue since last patch. WoW is the only program I have added to my new computer. Usually it says “not responding” then about 30 seconds later loads up. Very annoying
Can’t be right as Blizzard were blaming Twitch last week for our addon updater…they blames something else the week before. I dont understand why the actual Developers in Blizzard arent looking at this rather than a customer services rep?
I work for a Software development company , its the same thing. Developers don’t get involved until all the “Triage” has been done by support. Developers do not talk to end users, they are above that level.
They aren’t really blaming anything, they are simply trying to troubleshoot. If it isn’t happening to all players, or they can’t reproduce it internally they have to troubleshoot and see if there is something else happening. It’s why they also were asking for information to see what people might have in common.
It isn’t necessarily that the problem isn’t with Blizzard, it is that the problem could be with how something outside of Blizzard is reacting with what they are doing. It would still be something that Blizzard would have to fix, but they still have to figure out what it is that is causing it so they can look at what might be conflicting on Blizzard’s side.
There also are times when a problem looks like it is the same issue when it is caused by vastly different things. A good example of this is lag, it all mostly looks the same but the cause can be a lot of different things and sources. I might be lagging because my video card isn’t updated, while you might be lagging because your IP has routed you through a bad hop, etc. Troubleshooting and gathering information is really the only way to find out if there is a common cause.
Thank you for this post. I had FOUR (gasp) DBCache.bin tmp file that was all 30-31k KB each, and a 31k KB DBCache.bin file.
I deleted all 5 files, did a scan/repair on Bnet launcher just to make sure, and even though I still got the black screen upon loading the character selection screen, the loading time was significantly less, and I am not getting the (Not Responding) error message anymore. I did actually delete the entire Cache folder before once, as several people in this thread mentioned that it fixed the issue for them in short terms, but for some unknown reason it wasn’t doing the same for me.
I only logged onto one character so far, and my now newly created DBCache.bin file shows as 7k KB after I logged out. Still have to see how things turn out when I start logging onto my alts on different realms, but what you suggested seems like the best temporary fix for now… thanks again.
Still hoping that Blizzard can figure out what’s causing this issue & fix it for us though, as this wasn’t happening before Hallow’s End (at least on my end).
I have similar issue with opening professions window and character select screen, on my laptop which runs windows 10 …its the most noticeable ( like up to a minute - all random ) , and my 2 desktops in various rooms ( one has windows 10 other has windows 7 ) , similar issue, but usually from 10-30seconds on both the select screen and professions window.
so if its happening on 3 different devices with different tech spec’s than its not us, but WOW itself
Wanted to chime in here. I have been experiencing this over and over again. Glad to see the user base working together to figure out the problem!
I uninstalled and reinstalled the game after experiencing severe lag when I would realm switch, character load, and game entry load screens. The problem was temporarily resolved after reinstall. For about a few days the game would breeze through the realm load, logging in and out, etc. but it quickly reverted back to discussed issue.
I sincerely hope blizzard fixes this. Scandisk and defrags did nothing. Firmware is up to date and running the latest. Experiencing this on a Samsung SSD 960 EVO M.2, 1TB drive.
It IS something Blizzard has done to make this happen. It doesnt happen on its own when so may of us have this issue. I would imagine many many more do who do not have forum accounts etc.
I put up with these various, recent loading issues until the game started taking ~15 extra seconds to load into an arena. I ended up staring at a 100% loading screen for a while. This significantly reduced the amount of preparation time I had to change talents and talk about strategy before the doors opened.
If the delays further increased, I would have eventually loaded into an arena that had already begun.
I was only talking about the character select screen. I don’t PvP, but I can see where you are coming from. Either way, just glad they are working on it now instead of telling us it is our addons, ssd, etc.
![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")