PC problem mass tabling pokerstars

New to LiquidPoker? Register here for free!

Forum Index > General

locoo Peru. Dec 14 2011 18:13. Posts 4561

Anyone has or had a lag problem when playing 16~20 tables? I know it's not exactly lag but it's what it feels like when I open too many tables, my PC seems to freeze sometimes at random for some seconds and then comes back to life again. I tried installing and using CCleaner and I think it helped a bit but I'm still having this issue, it's very frustating and tilty sometimes makes me fold hands or have less time to think about decisions.

I'm just running table ninja, hold em manager and pokerstars while playing.

I got a Intel Core i7 2.93Ghz w 4MB RAM and windows 7. Also 1 tera hard drive.

bitte bitte bitte bitte bitte bitte

EvilSky

Czech Republic. Dec 14 2011 18:20. Posts 8915

Are you using HEM2? I tried the beta and had that same thing even with much less tables. Just try taking out the software one by one to identify which one is causing the problem.

taco Iceland. Dec 14 2011 18:23. Posts 1793

Really should've bookmarked my reply to that blog thread about this exact same thing.

This happens to >everyone (that's right, more than everyone) that has massive databases
like you undoubtedly have on a hard drive that's really no better than one from 2005 for this task.

If you want to confirm this just try playing 16-20 tables without having any HUD/Auto-import running,
should be no problems since there would be orders of magnitude less strain on your hard drive that way
and the rest of your system should run 20 tables easily (Only if you mean't 4GB RAM though obviously. )

Cliffs: Your computer's budget hard drive is not designed to operate large, active databases.

You could/should look into expensive SSD solutions or their data risking rival: RAID 0,
although I can't guarantee RAID 0 wouldn't have the same problem nor that the SSD wouldn't if your
database is truly massive.

c4rnage . Dec 14 2011 18:25. Posts 409

im just guessing in the dark, but maybe a disk defragment could work also.

TalentedTom This user is a quality poster

Canada. Dec 14 2011 18:37. Posts 20070

buy a solid state hard drive I bought one and my PC feels like it runs 4-5x faster

you can have the best CPU core, ram etc.. but if you have a regualar hard drive your computer is still limited to how fast it can run

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us and as we let our own lights shine we unconsciously give other people permision to do the same

NewbSaibot United States. Dec 14 2011 18:57. Posts 4943

On December 14 2011 17:37 TalentedTom wrote:
buy a solid state hard drive I bought one and my PC feels like it runs 4-5x faster

you can have the best CPU core, ram etc.. but if you have a regualar hard drive your computer is still limited to how fast it can run

Not exactly. Your computer is just limited to how fast it can launch programs. Battlefield 3 will run exactly the same with or without a solid state harddrive once the map itself has initially loaded. Programs like HEM run faster simply because they rely on constant harddrive access. Just depends on the application and use.

bye now

Last edit: 14/12/2011 19:00

longple

Sweden. Dec 14 2011 19:13. Posts 4472

works fine on my lap from thai, only diff is little worse cpu (i7 tho) 6gig ram and only 600gig HD

and have been 16 tabling for 4 days now ~6hours/day w/o any type of lag (w tableninja and hem)

so no ; <

the cleaner Germany. Dec 14 2011 19:23. Posts 3014

I'm not sure your problem is hard drive related, but i agree with tom. buying an ssd hardrive is the best investment ever. booting opening programs, everything is so much faster. i bought a small 60gb ocz hardrive on which i run win7, hem with 4million hand database and i have no problem running 24 tables (i usualy only play 12tbls). my hud has alot of stuff on it too. my specs are i5, 6gb ram. i go into postgres about twice a month and do database management which takes about 15minutes. i would also recommend you to go into the pokerstars menu and disable animation *options - table display options - animation - disabled.

there are no facts only interpretations

Last edit: 14/12/2011 19:32

locoo Peru. Dec 14 2011 20:10. Posts 4561

Evilsky I'm not using HEM2, I won't change from HEM1 unless it's a significant improvement in speed and interface.

SSD I never heard of that before but I will try it, do I just take my old hard drive off and install this new SSD?

Also disabled the animations just in case

longple I think it's because your database is tiny on stars.

Thanks everyone who posted.

bitte bitte bitte bitte bitte bitte

Fujikura United States. Dec 14 2011 20:18. Posts 1795

This has happened to me in the past. If this is the same thing that happened to me, it can be very bad. I recommend reformatting your entire computer. Basically what happened to me, was some of my pokerstars files got corrupted. I would be 50+ tabling sngs and some of the tables would literally never open because of the problem and I would just be sitting out of the tournament forever. Your computer is obviously very good, so it's pretty hard to rule out other possibilities. Reinstalling pokerstars alone did not fix the problem fwiw. Hopefully this helps =D

aka SouL)Z(Isadie and SouL)P(Fujikura

whamm! Albania. Dec 14 2011 20:39. Posts 11625

happened to me and i just set the opacity of the hud numbers to full opaque(black) instead of that transparent thingy. works wonders let me tell you.
transparency seems to be a motherfucker even for I7s even when i used to have a supercomputer built haha

GiYoM Korea (South). Dec 15 2011 02:50. Posts 455

if ur hard drive is 90~95% full u might experience unusual lag.

taco Iceland. Dec 15 2011 13:01. Posts 1793

On December 14 2011 18:13 longple wrote:
works fine on my lap from thai, only diff is little worse cpu (i7 tho) 6gig ram and only 600gig HD
and have been 16 tabling for 4 days now ~6hours/day w/o any type of lag (w tableninja and hem)
so no ; <

2.5" hard drives are faster because they haven't grown quadratically by half an inch
Less surface area to cover per needle per platter, some even have the same buffer size
and some even go further and are SSD hybrids which is quite possible if you bought your laptop in 2011.

But like I said previously, if locoo wants to check if I'm right he can just play 16 tables
with Skyrim/BF3/SC2 running meanwhile, these processes will be just as tough on everything
but the hard drive as HEM.

EDIT:
On December 15 2011 01:50 GiYoM wrote:
if ur hard drive is 90~95% full u might experience unusual lag.

Yeah definitely reserve at least 200% of your RAM size for Windows pagefile.
(200% just a random number pulled out of my ass but still, do it)

Last edit: 15/12/2011 13:07

palak United States. Dec 15 2011 17:54. Posts 4601

On December 14 2011 17:23 taco wrote:
Really should've bookmarked my reply to that blog thread about this exact same thing.

relevant TT blog entry
http://www.liquidpoker.net/blog/viewblog.php?id=988360

newb and taco posts from blog + Show Spoiler +

On September 28 2011 19:39 NewbSaibot wrote:
Does it ever freeze up when you're not running importers? The SQL databases that PT3/HEM use can get quite large, and tax the harddrive nicely, especially if you have several hundred thousand hands to even millions of hands in your database.

On September 29 2011 09:51 taco wrote:

Show nested quote +

What he just described never happens when a GPU gets overheated,
it's clear to someone with experience that this is either one of two things (or for obvious reasons, the combination of both)
1.) A faulty hard drive, what you just described is occasionally accompanied by the hard drive making 'tic-tac' noises for a while before, after or both
2.) A terribly fragmented hard drive, which is more likely to be causing problems in your case than most
since you have massive databases that are constantly being updated and accessed.

The reason we can exclude the GPU, RAM and CPU from being the problem is that the
mouse can not be moved without the CPU functioning properly, the RAM-CPU co-process choking would also freeze your mouse along with everything else and the GPU would not be able to choke at the processing and forwarding of the visual information
of everything but the cursor.

P.s. I assume you're quite the opposite of poor and would pay more than most to have this "minor" inconvenience
stop since a 5-8 second freeze can be quite pricey in a session so I suggest you
research the myriad of solutions technology has to offer you, keywords: Home server, SSD.
The former, with or without the latter, would for example allow you to play poker with your PT3 database
on a wireless laptop without it using your laptop's processing capabilities. (I don't think the actual stream of information between the program and the database is all that large in kB/s, the server would be doing >98% of the work).

On September 29 2011 12:10 taco wrote:
Just to re-iterate the actual description of your problem, TalentedTom:

While it is technically a "software problem", since your hard drive would be functioning properly if it was not
for the software, it's not really in your control to keep it from happening by doing anything software related,
you could find a temporary solution like CCleaning your computer and then defragmenting it (in that order)
but since your needs are just growing with every hand you play you'll eventually need to do something about this,
whether you want to do it now or later is up to you.
(If your computer is really a laptop like they are saying, with a 2.5" 5400RPM hard drive I find it amazing that your computer isn't slow to the point of frozen all of the time, running PT3 and all)

Oh and "by the way" (used quite freely) would LP please, for the love of all that is holy, stop being another one of the forums
where if someone asks for computer help pretty much everyone, no matter if they know anything about computers,
start shouting random, general causes for computer problems, this is as a perfect example of that, here's what happened here posted in order of events:

"Could be memory related"
"I don't know anything but..."
"Overheating?"
"It could be almost anything" (While this reply happened to have the actual cause in it it's still not a true statement at all)
"Reformat bro"
"Overheating, I once had a friend who had a computer problem caused by overheating which is why I'm saying it"
"Video card"
"Overheat bro"
"Yah overheating or something"

Here we get into the "OP is asked to do 10.000 different things which he in all likelihood isn't competent to do" phase, usually happens faster, I'll just list the things he's asked to do, even though zionlll's suggestion isn't terrible , this case doesn't need any actions by OP.

) Complete Windows drive check
) Complete Windows system file check
) Change a fan and then do vast statistical analysis that would take days of logging to complete only to see if it might be heat related
) Check if it's one of the RAM sticks via the process of elimination (Takes n^30 minutes to complete where N is number of sticks...)
) Clean the GPU's dust filter
) Uninstall McAfee with 30 minutes more of statistical analysis
) Now uninstalling any recently installed programs doing statistical analysis after each one
) Memtest
) Benchmarking
) Uninstall your GPU drivers, remove the GPU, install GPU drivers for a new card you got access to,
insert newly acquired GPU, do statistical analysis, then uninstall those drivers, remove the graphics card, reinstall your old ones, re-insert your GPU
) Run Hard Drive Fitness test (wouldn't find any errors and can't exclude the hard drive being overloaded as the actual problem)

This shit's got to stop, not just here on LP, but everywhere on the internet, this is the reason
why I'd never ever recommend to someone to ask for help on a forum, you'll end up wasting so much
time on a random goose chase and also buying random things that people who know nothing about
computers told you you should buy to fix a problem that it's just in no way comparable to taking it to a professional EV wise...

On September 29 2011 12:28 NewbSaibot wrote:
I agree with Taco, clearly a lot of people responding here who have no background in computer repairs. Yeah maybe they fixed a single problem they had with their pc 3 years ago and it turned out to be the video card or a broken chassis fan, but that does not make you an expert to start throwing out random "is teh video card, I underclocked mine and ran a fan speed tester that was only compatible with my make and model card and it worked".

Truth is it actually could be any number of things. It is a computer afterall. As taco mentioned systems arent capable of selectively processing certain parts of the display while the rest crashes. So his mouse could never freely move about the screen with the background frozen because his video card is crashing. (And now we're seeing "lulz I didnt read the symptoms" responses, cmon guys. If you arent going to read his entire problem then wtf are you doing here trying to solve it?)

I see systems that sporadically hitch like this all the time. It's almost always some software related issue. Good luck finding it though, because even if you do it might be something like svchost or any other innocuous background tasks that you'll never be able to trace. Honestly, I see these issues take so long to diagnose that a reinstalling windows would actually take less time. A full reinstall of Win7 takes about 30 minutes. Using Ninite to grab common files like Java and Flash takes about another 15-20 minutes. Reinstalling HEM takes about 10-15 minutes. Boom we're at about 1 hour of time spent and almost finished. Sure there are going to be various things like desktop shortcuts and internet bookmarks you'll be missing. Importing 10 million hands into HEM could also take a couple of hours. But at least you get the benefit of a nice clean healthy system, plus the removal of any number of other pending problems you may or may not have been aware of, or problems that were about to affect your system.

I know it sounds like more work because "reinstall" is such a big word, but trust me, after you start at 12pm trying to fix this problem and you're still working on it 6 hours later, you'll say to yourself "goddamn I would have been completely finished by 3pm if I had just formatted the bitch". I mean I dunno what exactly you use your pc for, maybe you have 100GB of video games and shit installed and it could be awfully inconvenient. You tell us your situations and we can give you the best course of action.

while ur buying a new ssd, buy some more damn ram...doubtful ur ever using up all 4 gigs of urs, or that u will really need more anytime soon, but it's cheap, easy to install, and can't hurt. Might as well do it if ur upgrading to a ssd

dont tap the glass...im about ready to take a fucking hammer to the aquarium

HeRoS)eNGagE Canada. Dec 15 2011 18:52. Posts 10896

On December 14 2011 17:37 TalentedTom wrote:
buy

what?
no need to buy anything
just repair it
...