SWG Guide: Lag Solution : Star Wars Galaxies Guides

Note: this guide was copy/pasted from the forum at http://www.TAULTUNLEASHED RULES.com/2635.html

I'm sure there are several of us who noticed that SWG can at times be highly
unplayable because of long 20 second pauses which occur every few seconds,
particularly within cities. And most people blame this on a laggy server,
but this problem actually has absolutely nothing to do with the network
connection. It is caused by not having enough RAM in your computer, and if
you'll indulge me I'll explain in detail what causes the problem as well as
how to fix it.

Firstly, this problem of stutters is mainly noticed by people with less than
1 GB of RAM. Why? The sad fact of the matter is that SWG suffers from a
memory leak. What happens is that whenever you enter a city or an area which
has a lot of 3D objects, the game caches the objects into memory so that it
doesn't have to recalculate the positions of all the buildings etc. which
could put unecessary strain on the server. There is a problem however, with
the game's code; the 3D objects are never unloaded from memory when you
leave the city or scenery area. So guess what happens when you go from
Coronet to Theed? You have all the graphics data from both Coronet AND Theed
stored in your RAM. That's bad.

So what happens if the amount of stored data exceeds the amount of RAM you
have? Windows operating systems have a technique to deal with memory
overflows, known as virtual RAM. Virtual RAM uses space on your hard drive
to store the excess the data. THIS is where the pauses are introduced,
because accessing the hard drive takes MUCH longer than accessing the RAM.
If you ever look at your computer case while your game is stuck in one of
these 20-second long pauses, you will notice the hard drive activity light
blinking rapidly. This is because the game is now frequently saving and
loading data from your hard drive instead of from your RAM.

There are actually 3 ways to fix this problem:

1.) Ask the devs to patch up the leak in their code
2.) Get at least 1 GB of RAM

OR

3.) Type in this command

/flushGraphicsResources fullReset

If you type this command in just once every half-hour or so, or whenever you
see the stutters starting to pop up, you can keep your memory fresh and
empty indefinitely. Give it a try!








Comments / Feedback
glytch on ehh
July 16, 2004

Seemed to work for me, still lags a bit but hey a little less lag is better than nothing.



God on Heaven
July 17, 2004

Just do a 30 min macro if possible for example name it lag and do

/flushGraphicsResources fullReset
/pause 1800
/macro lag

dunno if it makes this long pauses though

this is so old ive known this for months

I had a suspicion that it wasnt unloading the graphics lol, because every time I would change planets/sities it would just get slower ans slower. However, I didnt know the command to flush your graphics. Thanks!

crap i have 2 gig of ram and it still lags