TeaTimer and Guild Wars

Seeing problems with TeaTimer & Guild Wars

My system setup is as follows:
CPU - AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton
Mobo - Asus A7V880
Memory - 1 gig (2 x 512M PC3200)
Video - Leadtek A6600 GT TDH 128 MB
OS - WinXP Home w/ SP2
Virus checker - Free AVG
Firewall - ZoneAlarm

I recently installed spybot, and I have updated to all the latest file versions. When doing normal surfing, e-mail or other very basic activities, it seems to be working fine. I noticed that my bootup is now somewhat slower, but that's not a big problem since I often leave my system powered up for long stretches.

However, when I attempt to play Guild Wars with teatimer running, I'm now encountering severe problems:

  • It now takes a very long time to connect. Previously, logins took less than a second, and the "connecting..." dialog box would be gone in a blink before you could read it. Now it hangs there for several seconds, or even several minutes.
  • If I do manage to get into the game, I am seeing my initial ping numbers reported from the game in the 10,000 ms range. Normally these are below 200ms. Eventually, if I sit in one spot long enough, they will drop to normal, but then when I cross maps/zones, they spike back up into the few thousands range.
  • On a related note with the map and zone crossing, it normally only takes a couple seconds for my machine to load the map and switch to the map area. With teatimer running, it now sits at the loading screen for a long time (10 to 30 seconds, compared to 1 to 2 seconds before), and then it finally shows the map area.
  • During normal gameplay, I now see a lot of lag where I never did before. Also, my frame rates drop down to around 20 fps in some areas where I usually got 30-35 before.
If I kill off teatimer, all of these problems go away. From reading posts at a couple of Guild Wars forums, I found I am not alone in having teatimer issues with Guild Wars. Their solution has been to kill off teatimer.

Besides killing teatimer, are there any suggestions in how to solve this problem?

From the behavior I'm experiencing, it almost seems like teatimer is actively checking packets sent during gameplay. That doesn't seem necessary, but perhaps there is no way to easily classify those transfers differently to easily ignore them?
 
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So long as your using the latest version Of Zone Alarm you can set it to "Game Mode" by right clicking on the Zone Alarm Task Bar Icon and choosing "Game Mode" and "Answer all alerts with "Allow"" hopefully that will help.
 
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There aren't any alert messages popping up during login or gameplay, so I rather doubt that will affect the performance problems I'm seeing.

Or are you implying that there is potentially a class of alerts from teatimer that are otherwise invisible to the user?
 
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I was merely sugesting that there could be a problem with program access though the firewall. Have you run any anti-virus or anti-spyware scans recently? From what little I know about the Tea Timer it's only purpose is to look for registry changes and not monitoring internet access as that is the job of the firewall.

Other than trying the solution I already suggested and/or Turning off the Tea Timer I can't think of anything else that could be causing your problems other than its a problem with your internet connection.
 
Terminator said:
I was merely sugesting that there could be a problem with program access though the firewall. Have you run any anti-virus or anti-spyware scans recently?
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I just ran full sweeps with my anti-virus (AVG) and anti-spyware (spybot) within the last couple of days. My father had been infected with some kind of malware despite having up-to-date virus checking in place. Spybot was able to find and correct the problem. Given the fact that we have very similar machines (I built both of them), I decided to do a full anti-virus sweep and also install spybot to make sure I was protected against a similar kind of problem.

The anti-virus scans turned up nothing. The spybot scans found dozens of tracking cookies, and I let spybot eradicate all them. That's the good news.

The bad news is that teatimer seems to be a resource hog. Last time I checked it was consuming over 40 megs of ram, and even at idle it was hovering around 2% or more cpu usage. With the task manager up, I've noticed that teatimer sometimes spike its cpu use at times when there are other activities in flight. Although I can't monitor it easily while playing Guild Wars, it seems like teatimer is either hogging resources when I start up the game and when I change maps, or it is somehow slowing down the traffic between my machine and the server.

From what little I know about the Tea Timer it's only purpose is to look for registry changes and not monitoring internet access as that is the job of the firewall.
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That was my understanding as well, but the behavior I'm seeing doesn't seem to correlate with that. From what I know, the game does not access the registry on a regular basis.

If teatimer does only check registry changes, then I am curious as to why when the machine is idle, teatimer is continually showing up as using 2% or more cpu usage? Is it continually polling some files to determine when/if the registry is modified? If so, that could potentially lead to significant performance issues when other disk accesses are attempted.

I can't think of anything else that could be causing your problems other than its a problem with your internet connection.
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My internet connection is very solid. My DSL gives me a steady 1500 down/650 up, which is more than adequate to play an online game with little to no lag. The problems I'm encountering only seem to occur when teatimer is running. If I disable teatimer, all the performance problems vanish.
 
There have been few complaints in the past about the Tea Timer's CPU usage and the only things you can do about it are:

1: Not use it

2: Change the Tea Timer CPU Priority in the task Manger (Task Manager > Right click on Tea Timer.exe > Set Priority)
 
You could post the thread in the bugs section http://forums.spybot.info/project.php?projectid=1
By the way I agree TT is a resource hog at 40 megs but I did not find any abnormal CPU usage.

By the way TT never interferes with traffic and only oversees registry handles and host lists. Have you got ESET Antivirus?? It has a merciless hooking mechanism that could slow down internet traffic.
 
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nagan said:
You could post the thread in the bugs section http://forums.spybot.info/project.php?projectid=1
By the way I agree TT is a resource hog at 40 megs but I did not find any abnormal CPU usage.

By the way TT never interferes with traffic and only oversees registry handles and host lists. Have you got ESET Antivirus?? It has a merciless hooking mechanism that could slow down internet traffic.
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As I stated in my original post, I'm currently using AVG's free antivirus. I've also tried Avira's free antivirus. Neither of them appear to cause an issues with Guild Wars.

So far the only application I've found that causes any issues at all for me with Guild Wars is Spybot's teatimer. I'm currently running with teatimer disabled, and everything is running smoothly again.
 
Number of Connections Problem?

A shot in the dark, but you sound desparate...

My machine is having some immense slowdowns I've traced to XP's (SP2 & SP3) limit of 10 TCP/IP connections per second. Can't seem to trace all the culprits but shutting down SpyBot services fixed it.

Use Event Viewer|System to search for Tcpip Warnings.

(Could it be their advertising bots "calling home" a lot?)

Good Luck
 
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