Thread Lock Contention

Hi,

I am a friend, don't shoot the messenger. I read a recent post where management described the cause of the low performance. I think he was misled; or maybe that's only half the problem.

I'm sometimes getting frame rates < 0.5 (Yes, 1 frame every 2 seconds or less) even when there is only a single enemy on the map. Fixing instance crashes by spraying your code with lock objects will cause longer wait states and lock contentions. What I am experiencing almost certainly isn't GPU related... no amount of work will cause delays this long. It's almost certainly related to a thread lock contention.

Thanks for listening, don't give up... it's a great game and I like the idea of being "Designed to be played forever" as Chris stated at the last conference.

That's not your frame rate, it's lag spikes. This game's networking and servers are just awful. It's been improved a good bit, but it's still really prone to stuff like that happening if your internet slows down a bit, or there's lots of people playing at the time.