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A guide to improve wartune performance.

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  • A guide to improve wartune performance.

    First off, best performance doesn't mean you'll never get freezes or black screens. A lot depends on the condition of the server you'll be connecting too, as well as your internet connection. A heavy server load or a poor connection, or even a good connection with lots of jitter or other apps taking up bandwidth, or peak load times at your ISP's end will mean longer load times for wartune.

    You can check your internet connection's speed and quality at: speedtest.net

    Use both the speed as well as ping test to get a good indication of your connection.

    Leaving these aside, what I want to mention here are some steps which can be taken to make your own side, your own system as best as possible to play wartune.

    Let me make one thing clear:
    This is not a professional guide that can work wonders. Wartune being a browser based game using a lot of server side scripts, there is not a lot that can be done to improve performance as such, as things depend on the wartune server. (Thanks to ancev to remind me of this.)
    This guide thus, doesnt make wartune load blazing fast nor makes playing it a breeze.
    This guide is purely for those who face black screens, freezes and lags even when the wartune server, the internet connection etc. all seem to be working fine. This guide deals with those problems or issues ON THE CLIENT SIDE that causes wartune to freeze and generally makes browsers slow down and causes web pages/browsers to freeze.


    The first requirement is ofcourse the minimum hardware that can play wartunes at a decent level.

    A dual core processor and 2+ GB of RAM, and a good graphics chipset will get the job done very well. We dont require the latest Nvidia's or AMD's to render wartunes. Your Intel's inbuilt graphics is good enough. Though it is better if your intel chipset has a dedicated memory for graphics and does not share from the system RAM.
    Though we dont need 2GB RAM, I've mentioned 2+ considering that the OS (vista and above) themselves recommend atleast 2GB for the OS, thereby needing the '+' RAM for your apps.

    Moving on to the software parts:
    I use windows 8.1 pro and the instructions are based on a windows usage scenario.
    you will have to adapt them to match linux/unix/mac os yourselves as i dont have them. Sorry.
    You'll need to download CCleaner. Get it from filehippo.com or piriform.com
    It is a free program that cleans your system of junk files.
    Install it and run it. On the left side, select the cleaner tab.
    You'll find 2 panels ion the right side. In the windows panel, check mark everything except:
    IE: Autocomplete Form History
    IE: Saved Passwords
    Windows Explorer: Network Passwords
    Advanced: Tray Notification Cache
    Advanced: Wipe Free Space
    The above mentioned ones must be unchecked.
    Next, select the Applications tab.
    There, you'll find google chrome and firefox if you have them installed.
    In both, uncheck options that says something similar to
    Form history or Autocomplete or Autofill
    Passwords
    Cookies

    Then, click the 'Run Cleaner' Button. Wait for CCleaner to finish its job and then close it.
    Please note: you will have to close your browser and other applications to let ccleaner perform properly. So, dont run ccleaner untill you are able to close all other applications.

    For the browser, I recomend Google chrome or Mozilla firefox.
    Go for the stable versions of these. Personally, I use the 'dev' version of chrome. But dev and nightly versions of chrome and firefox are somewhat untested and you may end up having strange problems. So unless you are confident of being able to solve any such problems, stick with their stable releases.
    Avoid IE - not that I have any problem with IE, but sometimes, flash seems to do strange things on IE, So, better avoid IE. Safari is a good and fast browser, but I find that it takes up a lot of memory. I dont have much idea of Opera. Anyway, I found tht I got the best performance when using Google Chrome, followed by Mozzilla Firefox. No offence meant to fans of the various browsers, this is just my personal find, on my system. I use chrome and give 2nd preferece to firefox, and so the steps following assume that you use the same. If you use other browsers, you may need to skip browser specific steps or adapt them to match the browser of your choice.

    In both chrome and firefox, you have to find and install an extension called click&clean by hotcleaner.com
    For chrome, go to chrome webstore (Google search 'chrome webstore'), search for the term 'hotcleaner' and you will find the click&clean app by hotcleaner.com
    Similarly you can do for firefox by searching for firefox extension and using the search term 'click & clean' or 'hotcleaner'. Install this extension.

    Lets take the example of chrome. Once click&clean is installed, you'll find a red icon with 'C' on the right side of your chrome address bar. (For firefox, it is a blue icon without a 'c'). click it and you get a popup window with 4 tabs. Among the tabs, select 'chrome' and click the 'options' tile.
    In the options page, in the 'normal website' area, check mark everything except:
    Clear Saved passwords
    Delete cookies
    Clear saved form data
    These 3 should be unchecked.
    Please note: this is only for the options in the 'normal website' area. the rest of the options in under any other headings, if shown, are to remain unchecked.
    Then click the button 'run cleaner'.
    After the cleaning is finished, close chrome.

    Next, press winkey + r
    in the run prompt, type: cmd (enter)
    Command prompt opens up.
    here, type the following 3 commands:
    ipconfig /release (enter)
    ipconfig /renew (enter)
    ipconfig /flushdns (enter)
    the first two will reset your IP and thus, will break any ongoing downloads or browsing sessions. Dont worry, you can reload/redownload your stuff. Else, dont run these commands until after you finish your downloads. These two commands basically affect those who have dynamic IP and has no effect if you have a static IP.
    The 3rd command clears your DNS cache.

    Next, download the latest version of flash player from Adobe and install it.
    In case of chrome, there is an inbuilt flash player called 'pepper flash'. Based on adobe flash player, but it may not necessarily be the latest version you get from Adobe site. So, i prefer to use the flash player i get from the Adobe site.

    If you are using chrome, then after you install Adobe flash, Chrome will have 2 flash player plugins, namely the default pepper flash as well as the latest adobe flash player. Both plugins by default are active simultaneously and may cause conflict. So, we disable one of them. To do this, open chrome.
    Type in the address bar:

    chrome://plugins

    In the plughins page, expand the Flash Player plugin.
    Here you will see both adobe flash and pepper flash. You can identify them from the
    location information. The pepper flash version ends with the file name 'pepflashplayer.dll' while the adobe flash player you got from the Adobe site has a filename that is similar to 'npswf****.dll'. The **** may be some file version number or just the number '32' or it can be just npswf.
    Disable pepper flash and any other flash player plugins. Enable only adobe flash player 'npswf' plugin. Close chrome.

    A restart at this point is good, but not necessary.

    Fire up chrome again and open your wartune page.
    When you reach the '7Roads' loading screen, right click anywhere on this screen (not on the top bar that shows the times and event name, but on the load animation.).
    you'll get 3 options:
    Settings
    Global settings
    About adobe flash player

    First, select 'Global settings' and you get a 'Flash player settings manager' popup. Here, in the storage tab, click 'Delete All'.
    You'll now get a second popup. Here, check mark the 'Delete all audio and video license files' and then click delete data. This popup will now close automatically.
    Now, close the Flash player settings manager window.

    Right click anywhere in the wartunes screen (not on the top bar that shows the times and event name) and this time, select 'Settings'.
    In the tiny popup that shows up, you'll find some tabs on the bottom. click the one with a folder icon. This specifies settings for local storage for the flash player.
    Here, set the slider all the way to the right till you can see it says 'unlimited'.
    Click close.
    Thats it.

    You can repeat the steps with ccleaner and click&clean to clean again when you feel that wartunes has gotten slower or it freezes. Also repeat the ipconfig commands and the adobe flash player 'global settings' and 'settings' step.

    Defrag your OS and program files drive (usually C:\ ) and defrag it untill you cannot get any more improvement out of the defragmenter. This step increases the speed of reading things from your hard disk. You can repeat this step once a month or once in 2 weeks to keep your C: drive in top condition. Those with a SSD drive can skip this step.

    Keep your graphics drivers updated. Infact, keep all your drivers updated. The latest version of most browsers and flash player can make good use of direct hardware acceleration, thereby increasing the graphics rendering performance.

    Make sure that no other program is using your internet bandwidth when you are playing wartunes. This helps speed up loading. Some programs which can use your bandwidth in the background includes windows updates, other software updates, mail clients like outlook, download manager, torrent clients etc. Stop or close these programs.

    For those with additional hardware, there are a few more things that can be done to get more performance.

    1) If you have a spare secondary drive, you would benefit if you set the location of temporary files and program files to this second drive.
    2) If you have 4 or more GB ram, then creating a ramdisk and installing a portable version of chrome or firefox into it will greatly improve chrome/firefox startup times. You will need to create a ramdisk with an associated image file to do this step. Ramdisk size upto 500MB is enough for your chrome and firefox.
    Also, an additional ramdisk without any associated image file can be created and your temp folder location set to this ramdisk. Changing the temp folder location can be done from 'control panle/advanced settings/environment variables'. This improves performance vastly.
    You can get the software 'Primo Ramdisk' for this. It is a paid software, but I think there is a time limited trial version. You may try it and then buy if you feel the performance increase is worth it. Any other ramdisk software can be used. Depends on your choice.
    Please note: DO NOT DO THIS STEP UNLESS YOU HAVE 4+ GB RAM. INFACT, IT WOULD BE BETTER IF YOU FIRST STUDY YOUR SYSTEM'S WORKINGS AND FIGURE OUT HOW MUCH RAM YOUR SYSTEM USUALLY ACTUALLY MAKES USE OF (THIS IS DIFFERENT FROM HOW MUCH RAM YOU HAVE INSTALLED IN YOUR SYSTEM). THEN, EXCLUDING THIS AMOUNT FROM THE TOTAL INSTALLED RAM, IF YOU HAVE >= 1GB RAM STILL REMAINING, ONLY THEM GO FOR THIS STEP.

    3) If you have upto 3GB RAM, use a 32 bit OS. But if you have 4 or more GB of RAM, please change your OS to a 64bit one as a 32bit OS cannot read/write to RAM above 4GB (the limit is actually a little lower than 4GB, i think), so the remaining RAM is wasted.
    4) Set your pagefile to a fixed size, rather than a dynamic one. Around 2 or 2.5 GB seems enough in most cases unless you run programs that use up a lot of memory. Also, it is recomended to move your pagefile to a secondary harddisk or atleast another partition that your OS drive. This can be done from control panel/advanced settings/virtual memory




    Thats all. I'll update or post any new steps that I can find. If anyone has any suggetions, please inform me, and I will update the post accordingly.
    Last edited by Anarchist; 12-10-2013, 06:12 PM. Reason: sorry, no external links allowed

  • #2
    This guide is not very accurate and not very useful either.
    The only thing that will really increase performance is a SSD or using a RAM partition. But to use a RAM partition with a browser on it will require 2 things:
    A. Save data in the RAM partition every time you shut down (can take up to a few minutes , for 500 MB is about 5 min)
    B. Install a browser on the RAM partition every time you start PC.
    Programs and apps like CCleaner are not very reliable and can do more damage if used incorrectly.
    Flash Player settings are accessed via control panel since version 10. Also clearing adobe cache is good only once, it's like making a fresh game install sort of speak.
    The rest is server side related, so no matter how many times you defrag or how many drives/partitions/page filing you make it won't improve squat, you still need to refresh after every event/dungeon.
    IGN: AncientEvil
    Server: EU-271+merged
    Class: Archer
    Getting less Evil and more Ancient every day.

    Comment


    • #3
      I accept your reasoning that being a browser based game employing lots of server side scripts, there is not much one can do to improve performance. I have edited and updated my post accordingly. Thank you.

      But I don't agree with your point that only SSD and ram disk improve performance.
      They will affect the overall performance, true, but they are not the major factor.
      The reason for this is pointed out in your own post, that being that wartune is a browser based game and uses a lot of server side scripts. SSD or oodles of RAM or ramdisk dont affect them 1 bit. Rather, what these do is load your browser software faster and make it more responsive thereby affecting overall gaming experience. This is not wartune specific.
      Further, you will have noticed that wartune downloads lots of scripts and resources when it loads. As the wartune page is currently active, many of these usually remain resident in memory so that they can be retrieved ASAP, and thus dont need to be read of HDD/SSD thus a faster HDD/SSD doesnt effect this. On the other hand, when free memory gets used up, some of the contents of memory are written to your pagefile and/or to temporary folders. The pagefile and temp fo;ders being on your HDD, when they need to be read/reloaded, then a faster HDD/SSD does affect the load time. But, wartune usually reloads information from the server, and only keeps the most commonly used resources on the client machine, Thus, you'll notice that many times, your page and info is loaded completely, yet, the graphics seem pixelated or jagged and lagging.
      In this situation, having your temp folders on a ramdisk is favourable as being a ramdisk means it is purely IN THE MEMORY so that the wartune resources always remain in memory regardless of your OS/browser trying to shift them out of memory to your temp folders (because your temp folders itself are on the ramdisk).

      And, you dont need to reinstall your browser each time. Most ramdisk software supports loading an image. What this means is that they create a file whose contents emulate a HDD partition, then load this file into memory as a disk. You install your browser into this disk. In the background, the installed files are put into the image file and saved using whatever saving algorithm the ramdisk software uses. Thus, when you rerstart your PC, the ramdisk software loads up that image file, and the image file already contains your installed stuff which is now ready for use in the same way as if you installed it to your 'program files' folder. I recommend the ramdisk only to make your browser itself load up faster and be more responsive.

      Thanks for the reply. Please do post any further points or questions you have. It will help me improve this little guide.
      Thanks again.

      Comment


      • #4
        What I wrote was from my own personal experience. When I used my old HDD , no matter what I did I couldn't remove the laggy aspects of the game. Once I moved to a SSD, the speed of the game improved a bit, making it a bit more fluent, specially the loading times (transition screens).
        So CCleaner, defragment,page file don't work. They are useful in general but don't do squat in Wartune performance.
        Like I said RAM Disk partition can be used to save data inside it, BUT it will take a lot of time every time you shut down PC. I have 8 GB of RAM and I used RAM Disk a lot on some MMOs to improve loading times (adding textures to RAM disk). It's one thing to copy a file to RAM is another thing to save a file (image) using RAM Disk.
        Flash uses CPU and HDD. I have a quad core, so no CPU issues, thus the only remaining problem was the HDD. But still the improvement isn't very noticeable even with a SSD.
        Unless R2 does something on their side like making a mini-client available there is nothing much we can do about it.
        IGN: AncientEvil
        Server: EU-271+merged
        Class: Archer
        Getting less Evil and more Ancient every day.

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by PRinCEktd View Post
          For the browser, I recomend Google chrome or Mozilla firefox.
          Go for the stable versions of these. Personally, I use the 'dev' version of chrome. But dev and nightly versions of chrome and firefox are somewhat untested and you may end up having strange problems. So unless you are confident of being able to solve any such problems, stick with their stable releases.
          Strange problems.... Infinite Balens PLIS
          Everything is to blame...
          On R2Games

          Comment


          • #6
            I think this guide is useful.

            Comment


            • #7
              well i have a problem not on loading but ingame at the sky city i walk veryveryvery slow even on bg

              Comment


              • #8
                How many times do you startup and shutdown your system during one day? And, how many applications you open and close during one usage session of your computer?
                An average user may startup and shutdown his system 3-4 times in one day, maybe a few times +/-, while the number of opening and closing applications would be much higher... atleast in a normal usage scenario.

                I have 8 GB RAM too, and my CPU is an Intel Core i3, but I see no marked speed loss in shutdown/startup. In fact, my overall usage efficiency and speed has increased. Sure, there are increased bootup/shutdown times but it is an increase of an avg 4 sec, i.e., a total of approx 8 sec increase. Compared to the number of times i open/close apps against the number of times i startup/shutdown my system, using RAMDisk has saved me time in a higher order of magnitude. Also considering that RAM is faster than even an SSD, I notice a very improved performance when i put my temp files and chrome install as well as chrome cache on the ramdisk as opposed to putting them on HDD/SSD cuz reloading the wartune resources (or any data for that matter) from ramdisk (actual RAM) is many times faster than reading the same from HDD/SSD and copying it to RAM. Not only wartune, my overall browsing experience has improved due to this.

                Say, saving to ramdisk adds 4 sec to your shutdown, while loading adds 3 sec. A total of 7 extra seconds. Suppose you open 10 apps. You also close them. As they are read from your HDD, and all the linked files need to be loaded and considering that the files are not necessarily contigious in which case many of your HDD's rotations are wasted and extra times are needed for movement of the HDD armature, while a larger RAMDISK file has fewer fragments, if maintained properly and only need one time loading during system bootup, let us say, each open and close of an application when from ramdisk requires half a second lesser that when done from HDD. Closing them means writing changes to the files if any, back to your HDD again involving much wasted rotations while saving the RAMDISK file can reduce this as certain modes of ramdisk saving preallocate a fixed size file and insert the changes into this preallocated area all at once during shutdown again shaves off suppose half a second. In effect, it would save 10 seconds and add 7 seconds, a net saving of 3 seconds which still is a saving, not a loss. Granted this is not really noticeable, but my purpose was not to make really noticeable changes, rather to help them make things AS SMOOTH AS POSSIBLE.

                Again, as I said before, what I say here is not about miraculously improving wartune performance. I agree with you on this, as such a thing can be done only by R2, and not even then as it also depends on the user's internet speeds and connection quality. What I am trying to help others achieve is the optimum conditions ON THEIR OWN SIDE so that they can experience as best a gaming experience possible WITH THE CURRENT SERVER AND INTERNET CONDITIONS.

                Thanks for taking the time t reply. If you can add any suggestions which you think will help people have a better experience, not necessarily in terms of speed, but also things like lesser black screens or freezes, lesser flash plugin crashes and so on, please post it.

                Comment


                • #9
                  @Lexi

                  I can think of some reasons. I am not saying that it must necessarily b these, but maybe you can check it out and verify.
                  1) Your graphics capability (including chip-set, drivers and browser support for hardware acceleration). Though i think it least possible as today's on-board graphics itself are powerful itself. Then again, good loading, but slow movement also kind of points to lag in rendering. Do you get pixelated graphics? If yes, then this is the most likely culprit.
                  2) You say your loading is fine and fast. That indicates you have a good internet connection, which means we can remove it from out list of suspects. The next that comes to my mind is memory. If you have 2+ GB, then this may not be the reason. Still, even with 2GB, things can happen, like background apps running and taking up memory, memory management problems, too many extensions and apps and plugins loaded by your browser etc. With few extensions (5 to 6), loading wartune on chrome can often make chrome take upto 50+ MB RAM easily.
                  3) If your temp folders and temporary internet file folders are on your OS drive, then, is there enough space for them?
                  4) Is the local storage to flash limited?

                  Check these one by one, and do reply back your findings.
                  Thanks.

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