Client crashing, and also "Your authentication for instance transfer was invali..."

So, I've been having two problems with the beta client for a while now.

One, when I load areas--most often the Act 2 town, but sometimes random areas as well--I'll get an "Out of Memory" error followed by a second (VB? I forget) crash dialogue, and the game will crash. I'll copy the exact text the next time it happens.

I can't reliably reproduce it, but like I said it happens far more often when loading the Act 2 town. It seems to happen more often when the client has been running continuously for a long time.

I do have low memory on my computer and low harddrive space, leading to low virtual memory. Nevertheless, it's not that my computer can't run the game. It's just that sometimes it'll crash, even if I haven't been to more than 1-2 other instances in a while. Just cycling through several towns (in multiple difficulties) can cause this, sometimes. It is an infrequent problem, but still annoying.

The other issue is that, for the past several days, I've been getting kicked off the servers when trying to load an instance. It'll say "Your authentication for instance transfer was invali..." in the bottom left of the login page after this happens.

This comes in clusters. I will get it for almost every instance load for a period of time, then it will go away and I won't have problems with it.

It happens when loading both new and existing instances.

It does not always happen with the same instance. For example, if I'm trying to get to area B by way of area A, I'll be able to load A 50% of the time and B 50% of the time. It's not just A or just B causing me issues.

I do get the error sometimes when trying to load the town instances.

Again, I can't consistently reproduce this, but it's rather annoying.

I just thought I would report these two issues, even though I have very meager information. I'd be happy to answer questions about the problems as I can.

I have not copied the full text of the "out of memory" crash, but I will do so and either add it to this thread or edit it into this post the next time it happens.

ps, instability issues like this is another reason I'd like to see an option to increase instance reset length, even if it is a cash shop option! Replaying the same content due to disconnects/crashes is annoying. Obviously fixing the crashes/disconnects is a higher priority, but still. (ie you'll clear areas A&B, then crash before you can find a waypoint in area C, then area A has reset. It leads to much teeth-gnashing)

Did you already try the option suggested in http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/18346 for the E_OUTOFMEMORY-error? This error is thrown if the game can't find a chunk of memory that can fit the instance. Changing area's a lot will clog up the memory and therefor make it more likely to crash the game with this error.

As for the other error: It doesn't sound familiar to me, so I can't help with that I guess.

P.S. Increasing the time it takes for an instance to reset, will keep instances longer in memory. Therefor I suppose you would get more E_OUTOFMEMORY-crashes if you would do that.

Ah, thanks for the link. I'm always worried I'll report something that is known, sigh, so I never report anything--that one got by me since I added it as an afterthought to my second problem.

The instance authentication problem is happening MUCH more today than it has in the past. Not sure if it's a problem with my connection or the game, though everything else I've tried is stable--just not poe. The game is basically unplayable today, as I can't reliably load more than one instance at a time and making forward progress always causes me to time out. I've done river crossing twice in the past 30 minutes but I've yet to get past it, just because it's constantly resetting. Bah.

I feel like having longer instance timeout periods would strain poe's servers rather than my computer's memory, though.

Thanks again for the link, I'll give it a try!

ps, when I get the instance authentication thing: it happens after a VERY long load screen. Normally loading is very quick for me, but not when it's about to kick me off.

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Saela wrote:

I do have low memory on my computer and low harddrive space, leading to low virtual memory.

There is only so much we can do to help you.

2GB is the lowest youll really want to have to play....2048 Min / Max Paging / virtual memory file....If you do not set the MIN and MAX to the same value it can become defragmented as it skips files increasing the read / write times.

Defrag using IObits and let it do its Boottime defrag / optimization as well.


Remove (backup) screenshots from other games and these sit in the folders doing nothing.

CCLEANER to uninstall unused programs / correct registry

SPECCY to show your Hardware specifications.

Start > Run > Msconfig > Startup tab....Turn off some of the startup processes.

""-gc1"" or ""-gc2""

""--nosound""

Desktop Resolution lower and equal to Game resolution.

Turn off 32bit color in lieu of 16bit for desktop....drop the desktop image for a solid color...remove unused icons...

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Rory wrote:

For the "Your authentication for instance transfer was invali..." error, how long are you taking to load each area?

Far longer than it normally takes me. I'll try to time it more precisely, but it's easily 2-3x longer than normal. It happens when I re-visit an area, too, and thus presumably still have the area loaded in memory.

Having said that, I ran some tests. My numbers are below, but here is my summary so I don't waste too much of your time. Sorry for the long post. I assume more information is more helpful than less information, so I tried to be thorough.

Summary for series #1: I had 0% success with the US gate and 66.7% success using the EU gate.

Series #2 found a fix for the problem, although not the cause of the problem. It also apparently introduced a completely new issue, being randomly disconnected (with great frequency) in an otherwise stable game.

After I finished series #1 I tried stopping all downloads/uploads on other computers on the network. This fixed the problem. However, yesterday I tried severely limiting the other computer's bandwidth use, and it did NOT fix the problem. Is there any chance that this is being caused by some kind of routing conflict on my lan? Which ports does poe use? Is there a chance that some stuff from poe is being routed to the wrong computer? (I'm a bit out of my depth here, sorry if that's a stupid question.)

It doesn't feel like I am just lagging myself out: again, I don't experience connection issues or slow load times anywhere else, and again, giving this computer a good chunk of dedicated bandwidth didn't fix the problem, either. Also, when I *do* successfully load an instance while the problem is active, I do not experience high latency or noticeable lag. In fact, my ingame latency is almost exactly the same when I am/am not having the problem.

So, it's very tempting to write this problem off with "you're just overloading your connection," but that doesn't fit the rest of the data at all.

Also, while I was writing this post (during series #2), I got "An unexpected disconnection occurred" MANY times. About one every 3-5 minutes, but some were rapidly successive. This hasn't happened to me before, and again, this is with the poe computer having all available network bandwidth.

"

It could be that your PC is loading the area so slowly that it stops waiting for you, so your character doesn't find any instance waiting for them when they finally load?

Possible, though there's also a very high correlation between this error and "unable to connect to patching server" when I first try to run the client. This error is pretty fast, unlike the other two errors which feel more like time outs.

When I first log in, the "connecting to server" stage is extremely slow, too, and occasionally fails.

It could be caused or exacerbated by something on part--I know a good chunk of my bandwidth is being used by another computer on the same lan, but again, I'm not having issues with other stuff. A webpage will load without any kind of unusual lag, but merely connecting to the poe game servers can be difficult. (I assume retrieving the character list is not much more bandwidth intensive than, say, loading a forum page here.)

If there are any tests I could do to help you determine if this is caused by a problem on my end or yours, I'd be happy to help. Though like I said, I don't know how it could be *entirely* on my end, since I'm not having issues with other stuff. (I also just got a new router, but I was able to play poe without any problems for several days after getting it.)

"

When you press F1, what does it show as your fps and latency?

I was initially only able to connect using the European gateway, which is normally much laggier for me than normal. Using that gateway, my average latency was around 150MS with a max of 182 MS, but there were a couple of much larger spikes here and there. FPS while sitting idle in town was running at about 60, max of 67-71, and the occasional very rare, very brief, dramatic spike down to near 0.

Having said that, I can tell you from experience that this problem doesn't seem to correlate to high latency. When I can successfully load an instance, I have no problems fighting mobs or sorting my stash. In fact, there's no way to even tell I have a problem until I get to the next instance entrance, at which point I'll usually be booted.

After I was able to connect to the US gateway (with this computer/poe having all available bandwidth), I initially had an 80 ms latency with occasional spikes up to 400-600. I tried connecting to the european gateway, again without any downloads or uploads going in the background, and had 140 average latency. So the problem really doesn't correlate to latency at all, it was almost identical in both cases.



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Raw data:

Attempt #1 failed after 30 seconds
Attempt #2 failed after 115 seconds
Attempt #3 had "unable to connect to login server" after I was booted and tried reconnecting initially, which is pretty new to me. The problem got a lot worse after my initial post, more on that below.
Attempt #4 had "failed to connect to the instance" rather than the authentication issue, and took 226 seconds.
Attempt #5 was after a reboot and running minimal external programs (as unlikely as that is to help), failed after 45 seconds
Attempt #6 failed after (estimated) 90 seconds
Attempt #7 used the European gateway, and succeeded--after a great deal of "contacting server" lag, after 22 seconds. (Note: I've tried the EU gateway before and it hasn't reliably helped, so this may be luck.)
Attempt #8 used the european gate, and failed after 45 seconds (With a fast "contacting server" stage)
Attempt #9 used the european gate, and succeeded after 2 seconds. (With a slow "contacting server" stage)
Attempt #10 used the european gate, and succeeded after 2 seconds. (With a slow "contacting server" stage)
Attempt #11 used the american gate, and failed after 69 seconds (fast "contacting server")
Attempt #12 used the american gate, and failed after 91 seconds (very slow "contacting server")
Attempt #13 used the european gate, and failed after 68 seconds (slow "contacting server")

Series #2:

Attempt #14 used the american gate, and succeeded after (estimated) 5 seconds.
Attempt #15 used the american gate, and succeeded after 24 seconds.
Attempt #16 used the american gate, and succeeded after 2 seconds.
Attempt #17 used the european gate, and succeeded after 2 seconds.

"

Greybear1andonly wrote:

There is only so much we can do to help you.

Thanks. My computer is already pretty optimized, but if it really is a lack of memory on my part then I understand there's nothing I can do. I'll try some of the things you suggested that I had not already done/don't do regularly, and we'll see. I see some people are having this issue with computers far better than mine, and apparently it's considered a bug--we'll see what happens!

Thank you for the help, it's appreciated.

"

Saela wrote:

Also, while I was writing this post (during series #2), I got "An unexpected disconnection occurred" MANY times. About one every 3-5 minutes, but some were rapidly successive. This hasn't happened to me before, and again, this is with the poe computer having all available network bandwidth.

Okay, after leaving the client idle for about 40-45 minutes without any disconnects, apparently this only happens on the American gateway.

wonder if it has to do with total players or just the server.