Slow zoning / frame freezes: Found solution / culprit: Logs folder

[DoucLangur]

Dear all,

after starting to learn swarm kiting, I found the occasional frame freezes unbearable, I am sure you have had them, or found people reporting on those. They happen most notably when turning (keyboard or mouse), but maybe also when people enter (exit?) your zone.

I used to have this setup:
- all EQ game files: on a solid state disk
- all modifiable ini files: linked in from a magnetic disk (to avoid data loss)
- Screenshots & Logs folder: linked in from a magnetic disk (dito)

This did not significantly improve load times, and after I moved the SSD files to a ramdisk, I got suspicious. When I loaded everything from the ramdisk, the game was as fast as expected (very fast) and the freeze issue was gone.

It turns out that - even during login process, the EQ client heavily accesses the Logs folder(!). There's tons of read (write?) operations there, and even if the Logs folder is empty, it slows down the system terribly when that folder is on a magnetic (slow) disk.

So - I did the final confirming test with my initial setup: The only change was that I put the Logs folder locally on the SSD Everquest folder. And voilá: Problem solved! Load times are as fast as can be expected now.

TL;DR: Put your Logs folder on a fast disk (SSD or Ramdisk) to increase load times drastically and get rid of one source of ingame frame freezes

[JackFlash]

Also deleting the log periodically keeps the size down.