All our community players suffer from this.

When players join a Multiplayer Lobby, there's about a minute of freeze. Players cannot pick slots, admins cannot log in, everyone has to wait it out. While this is going on, both the video and the sound freeze, sometimes intermittently. The game doesn't crash, it recovers - so it's not a game breaker, it's just a bit of a niggle.

From what we noticed, it's happening only when joining servers with verifySignatures=1. Could be the cause.

Duplicate reports: 6012, 4988, 6179. Possible duplicates: 4490, 1129, 5248.

+1 @teaCup, i would add also that this "lag" gets worse if the server runs a mission that uses a lot of client side variables and scripting functions because of the "pre-game sync".

IIRC it was the same in the early A2 release

I looked at the EXE with ProcessMonitor, and it shows that during the lag, the game is scanning the entirety of "sounds_f.pbo". If it's making a checksum of that file, then it is likely to be a threading issue.

The entire game shouldn't have to freeze whenever it has something on the disk queue. Waiting for the hard drive is also the source of those 20+ seconds lag spikes that occur while playing a MP game.

This should definitely be high priority.

This is still happening as of 0.54.103957. You can tell by the animations in the background when the server is eventually ready to take input. Occurs when running own DS on my local machine and connecting with local client, too.

[Edit, Re: ~15400] I was running my server with verifySignatures=2 and saw users losing connection over it.

For the record, I moved all the sounds*.pbo onto an SSD, placed symbolic links pointing to them in their original location (the addons folder), and the freezing on connect is now 4 times shorter, which matches the difference between my HDD's read speed of 120 MB/s, and my SSD's 500 MB/s.

Problem solved. At least in my case. GameSpy! When I opened all the ports, I have no more lag. No lag when connecting. No lag in game. Do not crash.

Here are the ports that I have entered in my router:
6667 (IRC)
3783 (Voice Chat Port)
27900 (Master Server UDP Heartbeat)
28900 (Master Server List Request)
29900 (GP Connection Manager)
29901 (GP Search Manager)
13139 (Custom UDP Pings)
6515 (Dplay UDP)
6500 (Query Port)

I'm spoiled by UPNP. It is long ago that I had to enable a port. Please find a better solution before you published the game. :-)

same problem !

Can't wait for this to be fixed. The lobby is cute and all but it gets boring after a while haha.

Edit: Priority should be at least normal... not minor imo.

Can you attach rpt files with this issue? You can find rpt file in this folder. C:\Users\<Name>\AppData\Local\Arma 3 Alpha\ Every rpt has date and time in name, so you can find simply correct rpt file. Thank you

Actually this has been fixed in the Dev branch with the new sound update. The problem was noted in an earlier comment: The hard drive was loading a 2 gig audio file while trying to choose a role in the loby.

I have played a few times this week and the problem seems to be completely gone now that the audio file is about 200MB.

Hope this helps.

Fixed in latest version.