Intermittent Halting / Freezing / "Not Responding" Messages

[Sulimo]

Check it for what? We've looked at them before and we're not forcing anything, it's all mostly default.

Here is the specific link to adjust your graphics settings.

Sometimes Graphics drivers will override application (like Fantasy Grounds) settings, and try to drive the graphics as fast as possible, even with high end hardware.

[Thunderhead]

A follow up to my previous message... I attempted to run the game on another system tonight and experienced the same issue: lag (~30s-60s not responding) for clients (not on my DM session though). This happens when I have NPC monsters that aren't visible to the players -in this case, phase spiders, which makes this issue extra annoying because they blink in and out of player visibility. Only occurs when I'm moving the tokens, otherwise everything else in the game runs great. Interesting to note, if I move the player tokens the game lags too. We have LoS enabled, lighting enabled, and some animations (for water and some webbed tunnels with a breeze flowing through). Disabling the animations doesn't have any effect. Locking doesn't have any effect either.

Hoping that there's a fix in progress because we feel that the game is reaching a nice level of maturity with some of the features. The lighting effects are great! Can't imagine playing using FG without them anymore.

FWIW: Second system specs
Intel i9 7980XE / 64 GB RAM / Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 - single display connected @ 3840x2160
All drivers updated to current date and default settings set

[damned]

Thunderhead

Is this a long running game that was imported from Classic?
You might try start a new FGU only campaign and import the characters and activate module and run a test combat to see if the issue persists?

[Moon Wizard]

It's first on our list after the big undo rewrite that @cpinder is currently deep in the middle of.

We've heard from others that the token locking improves the issue; but the GM has to use it too. (i.e. hold Alt key to initiate moves)

Regards,
JPG

[DCrumb]

I think that part of the slow down is that in free movement (not locked, not GM while holding down Shift), FGU needs to check/reveal LOS for every twitch that the mouse/token moves. With locked movement, it doesn't need to check LOS until the GM approves the movement. And with the Shift movement, it doesn't check LOS until the token is released.

[Weissrolf]

Before the lighting update you could improve performance by removing all LoS occluders from large maps that you don't use for that session. During beta that didn't work anymore, but it may have changed back in Live. Back then this was a workaround for GPU load, but I would still give it a try.

What you do is to duplicate the map, disable one copy/layer and on the other copy mark all LoS/lighting that your players likely won't see this session and delete it. Thus occluders hidden behind several walls are not calculated for LoS anymore.

I am still confused by the part where you wrote that only a certain Windows user is affected as GM, but the lag happens only on the player side of things?

[Weissrolf]

This week our Pathfinder 2 group experienced the (likely auto-save) related "unresponsive" stalls for the first time. Every few minutes FGU would stall for maybe 20 seconds (did not stop-watch it). Apart from FGU updates the following things changed from last time we used FGU without the stalls:

- My Windows "Desktop" folder was moved to a NAS folder (+being automatically set to always offline).

- I re-enabled some overlay related extensions that I disabled before to check for targeting/rolls related issues.

- Several Character feats were deleted and re-added, because these feats now feature PFRPG2 R18 automation.

- Several PFRPG2 R18 Character effects were added to the PCs combat tab.

One of my players on a Linux laptop mentioned that his machine seems to be quite busy while the stalls happen. On my own AMD 5900X FGU server machine the "unresponsive" freezes of FGU would lead to Discord not reacting to Push-to-Talk as my group told me that didn't hear from me anymore unless I specifically switched to the Discord process.

[Weissrolf]

Some more information: We only played a single small encounter that evening. The rest was doing last touches of previous level increases and selling some last party sheet stuff. The db file is less than 1.6 mb in size.

[Moon Wizard]

FG does a lot of disk-related activity during play for logging as well as auto-saving. Please make sure that the FG data folder is not on a networked file location; this will cause delays.

Since we haven't made any client updates to Live FGU client since June 8, it seems like something has probably changed locally (such as the networked drive effect).

Regards,
JPG

[Weissrolf]

I listed all known changes in my last post. My data folder has been networked for several months without detrimental effects during game-play.

That being said I did some test about this last week, which showed that FGU keeps Windows from using its offline file cache while accessing files that are online (LAN), other Windows applications make use of the offline cache even for online files. Would be nice if this was improved at some point. I only tested loading a a campaign, but I assume that the same is true during game-play.

Since FGU is often CPU limited and its file performance isn't much faster with local files (M.2 SSD) - also a result of working with many small files, aka overhead - this doesn't make so much of a difference in practice, though. The whole campaign folder is less than 25 mb in size anyway.