Fix for weird lag issue in T2 when using Security Essentials/Windows Defender
Consider this:
You use Microsoft Security Essentials as your Antivirus/Spyware software for Windows XP/Vista/7;
OR
You use Windows Defender as your Antivirus/Spyware software for Windows 8 (which is turned on by default);
AND
Your Tribes2 setup has logging turned on so that it writes to the console.log file in Gamedata folder;
AND
Your console.log file is somewhat big (a few MBs will definitely do it)
THEN
You may experience extreme lag when starting up T2, pinging servers, playing the game, etc (i.e. performing any event that writes something to the console.log). Also if you open up Task manager you'll notice the process MsMpEng.exe is pegging equivalent of 100% of one of your processor cores.
Fix:
You have a couple options:
Additional Info:
This is a relatively new problem with Security Essentials/Windows Defender that has plagued a lot of other software that write to big log files as well. There's a few posts scattered about on the Microsoft forums but I don't think the issue's been officially acknowledged yet by them. If you notice extremely slow and odd behavior in some of your apps, this could be the culprit! When that happens, check taskmgr for abnormal MsMpEng.exe utilization. I've duplicated this issue on 3 machines now, with all differing hardware.
You use Microsoft Security Essentials as your Antivirus/Spyware software for Windows XP/Vista/7;
OR
You use Windows Defender as your Antivirus/Spyware software for Windows 8 (which is turned on by default);
AND
Your Tribes2 setup has logging turned on so that it writes to the console.log file in Gamedata folder;
AND
Your console.log file is somewhat big (a few MBs will definitely do it)
THEN
You may experience extreme lag when starting up T2, pinging servers, playing the game, etc (i.e. performing any event that writes something to the console.log). Also if you open up Task manager you'll notice the process MsMpEng.exe is pegging equivalent of 100% of one of your processor cores.
Fix:
You have a couple options:
- Turn off console logging in Tribes2: Append the line setLogMode(0); to your TR2HudPrefs.cs file in Gamedata\base\prefs folder (This should nearly guarantee that logging is turned off no matter what mod you're running, as that file is one of the last original T2 scripts to get executed after everything else does.)
- Exclude the process Tribes2.exe from being scanned by Security Essentials/Windows Defender. To do this, in either of those applications' windows, go to Settings->Excluded processes, type in Tribes2.exe, hit Add, then hit apply
- Manually keep your console.log file size small by deleting it every so often. There seems to be no lag if the file size is small
Additional Info:
This is a relatively new problem with Security Essentials/Windows Defender that has plagued a lot of other software that write to big log files as well. There's a few posts scattered about on the Microsoft forums but I don't think the issue's been officially acknowledged yet by them. If you notice extremely slow and odd behavior in some of your apps, this could be the culprit! When that happens, check taskmgr for abnormal MsMpEng.exe utilization. I've duplicated this issue on 3 machines now, with all differing hardware.
Comments