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View Full Version : Keystroke stream freezing once in a while



Flks
12-22-2010, 12:21 PM
Every once in a while keystrokes seem to be detected by TS late, like something, somewhere is busy for a moment and temporarily stops the stream of keystrokes. It usually happens every few minutes and it usually lasts a little under a second, though one time it took so long I nearly died. A few plays ago it happened at the very end of Unforgivable while I was at 100% accuracy. It took me several more plays to get it AAAd again, but it's extremely annoying. At that point I decided to uninstall my keyboard driver (it's now running on the default Windows XP PS/2 driver which I assume to be faster because), kill everything that isn't a service or system process (including explorer and several drivers) and set plugin-container.exe (which runs flash when using firefox) to realtime priority, which helped loads, but it still happens occasionally. I've also been running with task manager on while I'm playing (need to screencut to play properly anyway) to see if there's sporadic CPU activity when it happens, and have even played with sysinternals/process monitor on to check for weird stuff from flash, but have found nothing whatsoever.

I'm using firefox 3.6.8 with flash 10.1.102.64, running windows xp 32. It isn't particularly slow or anything (core 2 quad 2.66 GHz, 4x 1GB RAM and a HD4870 gfx card.) I've already checked for malware (keyloggers in specific) several times using linux-based scanners to increase the chance of finding things like rootkits, but never found a thing. I tend to keep an eye on network activity as well (using a router's activity led, not the flashing icon which can be easily faked) but never even found anything remotely suspicious.

Anyway, I seriously doubt this is a TS bug because TS itself doesn't hang (gfx and sound continue normally). I'm just wondering if it's just my computer or if it happens to more people.

Tasselfoot
12-22-2010, 12:33 PM
Apparently I'm the only one that DOESN'T have this issue...

ShineyThighz
12-22-2010, 02:15 PM
me too ... wonder what it is

Jonny
12-22-2010, 03:02 PM
i have this also, i always thought it was just me.

isk
12-22-2010, 04:52 PM
I've had this happen too, but only in Firefox. It seems to happens more frequently when there's other "active" tabs/windows open (the chat, for instance). I switched to playing the game in Chrome and haven't had any input issues since.

Patashu
12-22-2010, 05:42 PM
Game Booster 2.1 and Google Chrome and close stuff you don't need

quote this post until the end of time

Flks
12-24-2010, 05:42 AM
I think I've pretty much figured out at least when it happens... When it happens, firefox always seems to be busy reading and writing files relating to cookies, addons, preferences, etc. I suppose that this stuff is done by the VCL thread, which also handles transfering keystrokes from windows to flash. Since file I/O on a regular hard drive takes noticable time, it blocks the thread from handling incoming keystrokes for a short while.

I thought I'd fixed it yesterday by getting rid of the cookie storage files (because they were relatively large and clearing firefox's cookies normally didn't seem to help), but while it seems to have hugely sped up firefox's startup times, the ingame lag still happens when it's doing stuff with other files. I doubt it can actually be fixed without a rewrite of firefox itself, so I suppose I'd have to agree on using another browser.

Anyway, it's not a bug in TS, so if it's on a bugs list the admins can get rid of it.

Jdeadevil
12-24-2010, 04:56 PM
Apparently I'm the only one that DOESN'T have this issue...

Lmao I don't have it either, no problems whatsoever, perfectly fine and fast, which is why I play this game for at least half the day every day.

Patashu
12-24-2010, 05:27 PM
aren't flash cross-compatibility issues so fun???