Sometimes laggy- Sometimes silky smooth- HELP!

[angelof2070]

I don't know where else to put this, so I'll just put it here.

I run a 2.4ghz Core2Duo (OC'd to 3.3ghz) and 4GB of ram, raid0 7200rpm HDD's and a ATI 4850 graphics card.

My campaign file is only 6MB and I only use 4 trees, 1 bridge and about 4 textures.
All the textures are small, anywhere from 12kb to 100kb. None are very big at all.
No lightning, nothing special.

Whenever I make a map bigger than tiny, I get lots of lag!

Well... I got fed up with that. I tried Messing with settings. I turned off Adaptive Anti-Aliasing in the ATI 4850's control panel. It fixed it! It became smooth. I close it and restart, and it's laggy again.

I tried messing with ram memory. I made the maximum 1400, laggy. 1000, laggy. 500, smooth. 1000, smooth. Then 1000 goes laggy. 500 again, laggy.

I tried messing with MINIMUM memory to be equal to max. 500/500, it worked! Smooth. Close and restart, lag lag lag, smooth, lag lag lag.

It doesn't seem to matter what I do or don't do, how I make it or not, how much RAM I pick or any settings. It seems to "roll the dice" on whether or not it'll be laggy or smooth when moving around the map or zooming in/out.

I am getting really annoyed that sometimes it'll load the 6mb campaign file silky smooth making me so happy. Then next time I load it, it's REALLY laggy. Then just "smooth enough" the next time, and laggy the next. I don't want to have to restart 10 times just to get it to be smooth. Ive tested it with all kinds of settings, normal to extreme, and nothing gives.

[Chrest]

First off, could you provide your operating system and Java version?

Second, I don't claim to be an expert on troubleshooting MapTool performance issues; your problem doesn't look like anything I've encountered. However, two things that could provide some more information about what's happening are:
1) When MapTool is lagging, go to Tool->Collect Performance Data, and post some of the output when you drag the map around a bit.

2) Use some sort of system monitoring tool to take a look at what the hardware is doing when MapTool is lagging (for instance, is there a lot of disk activity?).

Someone else may be able to look at your symptoms and recognize the problem immediately, but if not, taking those two steps will help narrow down the source of the problem.

[angelof2070]

First off, could you provide your operating system and Java version?

Second, I don't claim to be an expert on troubleshooting MapTool performance issues; your problem doesn't look like anything I've encountered. However, two things that could provide some more information about what's happening are:
1) When MapTool is lagging, go to Tool->Collect Performance Data, and post some of the output when you drag the map around a bit.

2) Use some sort of system monitoring tool to take a look at what the hardware is doing when MapTool is lagging (for instance, is there a lot of disk activity?).

Someone else may be able to look at your symptoms and recognize the problem immediately, but if not, taking those two steps will help narrow down the source of the problem.

Thanks.

I'm using Windows XP and Java 6 (the newest version)

I will do the rest as well, thx.

[angelof2070]

What I find to be the weirdest thing is...

It now always starts laggy, in a non-maximized window.
Anytime I hit maximize, it becomes very smooth.

Then later randomly, it'll start lagging very badly.

To fix it, half the time all I have to do is dbl click the top bar (restore it to a window) and then click maximize again and it smooths out.

Other times, that doesn't fix it, and I'm left with waiting and retrying the window/maximize again when it eventually works and smooths out.

I really don't know what's wrong with it. I am going to test it on my other computer to see if it's something wrong with that setup.