I’ve been fighting this issue for several months and am out of ideas on what could be wrong.
What happens: Randomly when playing the game, but more so during raids or dungeons I will start to lock up every few minutes and my world ms will jump into the hundreds. When the freezing happens the entire game is frozen but I am able to use my other screen to run speed tests etc. When the freeze unlocks I feel the lag kick in and typically continue to freeze off and on for thirty minutes.
I cant replicate the issue on command, it is completely random.
Computer Specs After trying every rabbit hole option I could find on internet I was convinced it was my computer so I got a new one last week and the issue is repeating on the new machine that had no shared parts/data copied over.
Processor: Intel(R) Core™ i5-14600k 3.50GHz
Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce RTX 4070
RAM: 32 GB
System: ASROCK Z790 PRO RS
Windows 11
My previous machine was running a NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3070 and was about 3 years old.
Things I’ve tried:
Uninstalled Game
Reset Cache/Addons/WTF
Went to minimal WA/Addons that were only major ones like Bigwigs/MRT/Weakauras
Ran speedtests on internet during issue (Fiber internet downloads 900mbps/ upload 915 mbps on average)
Updated all drivers
*New Ethernet Cord / Tried Wireless Adaptor
Switched to Direct 12 and 11
Trace Route During Issue
Tracing route to 137.221.105.2 over a maximum of 30 hops
I’m at a loss at this point as the new computer should have no issue running warcraft but is showing the exact same symptoms I had on other machine so hardware isn’t likely. Other people in the house never experience any issues with lag when the issues happens to me and the trace route seems okay so network also seems stable.
Now you are showing another device.
What I wonder if you can connect … Wired to the 192.168.0.1 directly?
So Computer … Modem … Internet.
I assume you have a router in between like.
Computer … Router … Modem … Internet.
Is that how you are connected?
This time it was just a ms jump with some lag but I didn’t freeze. I did use a VPN tonight to see if that made a difference and I got the freeze/ms spike while in a dungeon. Im noticing it seems to always happen during peak hours, Ill attempt to catch it tonight.
Very likely judging by the data in the WinMTR. The first hop in the test, which would be your home equipment or the closest ISP node in your neighborhood, shows a high packet loss percentage. That loss will affect all hops after it.
I went and raided at another house yesterday to test out the modem/ISP node theory and shockingly still got the exact same freezing between peak hours. Someone else in the house was literally in my raid and he was not experiencing any issues at all. I even used a different wireless adaptor to make sure it wasn’t mine (though Ive already tried this at home too). The fact that it seems to only happen from 7pm MST - 10pm MST even on a VPN/different networks/modems/different computers…Im baffled.
This makes me go back to an addon/WA but I have fresh installed many times, I’ve disabled them all when it happens and ms doesn’t drop, and at this point I’m only using minimal addons/WAs (and even those are popular ones like bigwigs, details, elvui).
If you logged into another computer…with the same issue. This might be a sever side issue, but look first and see if you have and macros that are calling old or out dated spells. This may or may not be the issue.
I recommend to open a ticket for them to look at the server side settings.
If it is your game that is lagging, and you’ve changed out your hardware - it’s the game.
You minimized your add-ons, but did you disable them entirely? I’m only questioning this because I’ve personally seen TSM and ElvUI (especially with the new font issue) be problematic. Since it’s random, and a PITA, welcome to vanilla. Disable them all.
Next, just run an infinite ping test against whatever. You’re going to want to hit your local gateway (192.168.0.1 or whatever) and then a few hops down the road. The basic idea here is that you’re testing your NIC against packet drops and your gateway for stability with these tests. Don’t just rely upon the default byte-size (64?) for ping, also perform a large packet ping. When the problem occurs, do the control-c and see what the packet loss is. Most packet sizes for ping are small so packet fragmentation isn’t detected which is why you want to try large packet pings. If you get fragmentation, it may be an MTU thing.