UNBEARABLE lag since 8.2 patch

Support Mac Technical Support
1

Ever since the most recent patch of 8.2 my Mac experiences such lag issues where even walking around on my toon causes it to lag - making playing almost impossible!

Before the patch I could run WoW on setting 7 but after the patch I put it down to 1 and am STILL having lag.

Am I the only one? How can I fix this so I can play in peace again?

Computer specs:
MacOS Mojave 10.14.5
MacBook Pro (15 inch, 2018)
Processor: 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory: 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
Graphics: Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB. Radeon Pro 560X 4 GB.

3 Likes
2

I too have been having a lot of lag since 8.2 launch. Sometimes my character doesn’t even load in fully for 1 min straight after a portal or instance.

2 Likes
3

What kind of lag? Does the game have low framerate, high latency, or another type of issue?

Note, latency and framerate can be verified by hovering the mouse over the “?” help icon in-game.

4

My latency is between 14-18 ms and my frame rate is usually in the 70s and it is still happening. Its like when there is a scratch on a CD - it still plays but then it pauses and picks up somewhere else. Its only been presence since patch 8.2. Please fix.

5

Noctivagant,

That still could be a couple different kinds of lag based on the description. Does the game screen change colors/beachball for a bit? Do characters run in place? Does everything just stop exactly as it is for a few moments with no motion of anything, and then it suddenly skips to another frame and everyone is doing something else? Does it only happen while casting abilities and looting, or no matter what you’re doing?

6

Does the game screen change colors/beachball for a bit? No
Do characters run in place? No
Does everything just stop exactly as it is for a few moments with no motion of anything, and then it suddenly skips to another frame and everyone is doing something else? Not exactly, it doesn’t completely stop but it skips like when you’re watching something through a strobe light.
Does it only happen while casting abilities and looting, or no matter what you’re doing? It happens no matter what. :c

8

When you zone in any portal, you can’t move.
When you try to get through places, there is like an imaginary boulder that’s stopping you from moving forward.
Hearthing using the signet: After loading into Boralus, it takes a minute or 2 to be able to move, then slowly the gray outline of the ship comes.
If you’re impatient and continues to strafe forward, you’ll end up in the water.
I have learned to just sit still and let the lag catch up, but my husband cancelled his account out of frustration.

I mean, come on Blizz, these reports of lag and artifacts had been around for 2 patches now, yet every time somebody posts something, all we get is a question back from a Blue and no solution.

2 Likes
9

Noctivagant,

That sounds connection related. Can you run a pathping for us while the problem is happening and post the results here?

10

I’m having similar issues. I get VERY slow load times, which wasn’t there in 8.1. 8.1.5 introduced the artifact issues, which is mostly resolved in 8.2. Now, it’s almost as if they disabled any graphics accelerators in 8.2. Even the maps, Mission Tables and textures take forever. On top of that, there are invisible walls! Game freezes and you end up in a different spot when it unfreezes, etc. Horrible game play! This is on a 2013 iMac, Nvidia GPU. Again, I think all graphic accelerators or even Metal has been turned off or greatly limited. :frowning:

11

Those behaviors don’t sound like missing graphics acceleration. it’s severe fragmentation of casc on slower platter HDDs. It may sound silly, but completely uninstall wow and reinstall it would probably speed things up quite a bit.

12

I can try that. All I know is that this is by far the worst and slowest I’ve even seen wow. Makes me sad. I don’t really want to buy a new computer just to fix this, so hopefully reinstalling helps. Thanks.

13

Hey, Irishmick…did re-installing WoW resolve the issue?

14

Load screen times have probably tripled since the patch, I got the running in place after zoning in or landing before but now it takes longer, and the worst part is that I can’t mount without my character completely disappearing and screen freezing. If i dismount, the screen will update with where i am usually, but it is taking occasionally up to 3min or so for everything to load so I can mount.

The worst occasion was an AV last night on my paladin. I was 15min. into the bg and I couldn’t mount without disappearing, but I couldn’t even use divine steed without everything disappearing. I’m sure Omegall is right and it’s an HDD issue, but it’s gone from annoying to severe since the patch. I guess I’ll try reinstalling, and update.

1 Like
15

I’ve noticed performance drop since the patch…

16

Has anyone come up with a fix for this? The lag is just… unreal since 8.2. Hearthing to Dal or Zuldazar, I wont see my character for a solid 30 seconds to a minute after the world starts to load around me. When mounting, character vanishes for a long time again. Spells and items in bad take a long time to load. Maps are horrible too.

1 Like
17

I have been having the same issues, but it’s not lag it’s loading times. Even after the games loads from the loading screen it takes over a minute, depending where your character is, before all of the environment around you completely loads. It doesn’t matter what your settings are at the load times remain stagnant. Seems to be a HDD issue.

18

The only short term solution is to reload game data. it completely defragments casc file structure. and I need to note again that casc fragmentation is a probelm with how CRAP the format is that blizzard uses.

you could even defrag HDD and that won’t help at all because the issue is that the data is fragmented INSIDE of compressed archives which means it’s not even necessarily fragmented in normal sense (remember macOS already takes great care in avoiding actually splitting files on disk. It’s just this doesn’t help with casc since all the files are WITHIN files on the disk).

on a fresh install all the files are cleaned up and reorganized sequentially. So tree 1 through 10 in elwynn forrest will all be in archive .001 (simplified example).

However, over time and over many patches the files as they get replaced don’t get replaced in their original location they are always added to the end of the highest numbered file, and then the indexes are rebuilt to tell the game “when loading into elwynn forrest tree 1 is in file 1, tree 2 is in file 47, tree 3 is in file 108, etc”. thus the defective fragmentation problem of CASC.

Reinstalling game completely, isn’t even required, you can retain all configs addons etc and instead of using “uninstall” and “install” just exit out wow and launcher, and when both are completely closed open up WoW folder and drag that entire DATA folder to trash and empty it. fire up launcher and hit update. Game will detect data is missing and regenerate a brand new one completely free of fragmentation.

Note that if you have classic, or ptr or other copies of games installed, deleting data folder deletes data for all games, so you need to hit update on each of them to restore the data.

In fact one of the key reasons for performance being worse than ever, is because as of 8.1.5 and later, all games share data so if you have 3 copies of wow you have fragmentation THREE TIMES AS FAST. Blizzard meant to improve things and save space with shared data, but not addressing underline crap performance of casc first, has exponentially worsened the perofrmance issues of casc over time. I’m literally reloading my data every 2-3 months now to keep game performing well, and that’s using an NVMe SSD, you HDD users might get frustrated enough to do it even more often if you have fast internet and no data caps.

Another note, AFPS is MUCH slower than HFS, for physical hard disk drives especially, yet apple forced all users on 10.14+ to use it anyways for security reasons. As such 10.14 (or 10.13 if you did a clean install) also slowed your disk performance a ton. An additional way to improve wow performance if you are tech savvy enough is to create an HFS+ partition within your system disk just for WoW to run off of. This improves performance a ton too. Heck even on an SSD this improves performance a bit. APFS and CASC do NOT get along at all because casc does everything possible wrong that’d impact performance on a APFS filesystem disk.

2 Likes
19

The problem that Omegall outlines above is also conflated by the slowdown issue present in APFS as well.

The problem with APFS itself is that every file has what are called b-tree extents nodes. Those tell the OS where to look for changes to the files when they’re altered or updated. In HFS+ those nodes are fairly limited in number and are appended, not simply incremented in number. That is if a file is changed ten times in HFS+, it still has the same number of b-tree extents nodes.

But in APFS, every time a change is made to the file, a new b-tree extents node is created detailing the changes. That doesn’t hurt so much with only a few changes, but over time, when a file receives dozens or hundreds of changes, you get that many more b-tree extents nodes. Now multiply all of that by the number of file changes done in a typical game patch cycle. Starting to see the problem? You’ve got thousands of changes times thousands of new extents nodes, which is what makes APFS itself a slog, especially on physical platter based hard drives.

Even OS X itself becomes essentially “fragmented” in much the same way CASC does. It’s a double whammy. You’ve got CASC’s internal data and index fragmentation over time, and APFS’s own pseudo-fragmentation over time. Both conspire together to make things slow to a bloody crawl. Even NVMe SSDs, the fastest available for Macs on the Market can’t claim immunity to the problems. They too eventually suffer slowdown because they’re reaching full queue depth and maxing their IOPS (input/output operations per second) and what you end up with is an unusable mess. When that happens, you actually need to clone your OS so you have your user folder and preferences saved, and then do a wipe and reinstall of the OS itself, with the added hassle of using Migration Assistant to re-transfer your settings, user folder, and preferences back after the OS has been reinstalled.

And as of Catalina, APFS is forced. You’ve got no options. You’re going to start seeing the effects of this occur more and more frequently because Apple themselves are refusing to fix the extents node problem in much the same way Blizzard is unable to really fix the CASC fragmentation problem (it’s a licensed technology and Blizzard isn’t exactly getting any love in getting fixes worked on sadly).

And if that weren’t enough, Catalina will also separate user and system data, presenting them as two separate volumes even though they’re inexorably tied to a single real volume. This is called APFS Groups, and it’s going to make the OS side of things a nightmare in the near future. Apple’s going full bore iOSifying OS X here.

If you think CASC fragmentation itself is bad, wait until Catalina and APFS start screwing with you. This place is gonna light up like a spaztastic Christmas tree.

1 Like
20

It’s presented as one volume when it’s actually two. I don’t see how this is going to be a nightmare.

21

I feel like the two volume thing is a sidetrack, it nas no bearing on functionality or performance of apfs with where wows concerned. the other points stand though.