PSA: One Drive may temporarily lock XIV log files causing game lag

[Catwho]

I've been battling unusually bad lag since patch 5.5 came out. I'm on Charter Spectrum (sigh) so occasional bouts of lag are a way of life, but this was extremely unusual in that I would freeze for 10-15 seconds, then get a rush of activities all at once in a burst once the freeze lifted.

Once it was most definitely my internet (I had a download speed of 0.0.7 on speedtest) but last night's egregiously bad lag prompted me to run a series of basic diagnostic tests.

1. Continuous ping to Primal DC - pings remained fairly stable, with some latency spikes but no lost packets
2. Local network program usage on my system
3. Local processes via Task Manager

What I discovered was that One Drive was hogging up bandwidth occasionally. Puzzled, I disabled it entirely, and found that the lag improved considerably shortly after that. I also nuked Chrome, but after some thought I'm about 90% sure that One Drive was the source of the lag.

Why?

The default installation of FFXIV on Windows stores certain files in Documents/My Games. This includes your game's local log data. This folder is synced by default to One Drive. Log files don't take up a lot of room (they're text files, measured in kilobytes) but that doesn't matter if your computer is having a read/write war with one of them. That.... is a problem when you are in the middle of a complex summoner rotation in a Nier raid. XIV and One Drive would fight for ownership of the file, and eventually One Drive would be satisfied with its file syncing, and relinquish control, giving my poor game the few moments it needed to catch up again.

TL;DR IF YOU ARE HAVING WEIRD LAG SINCE 5.5 DISABLE ONE DRIVE.

The more permanent solution is to exclude the XIV folder from One Drive sync entirely, since they're log files! They don't have to be saved forever! A much better solution for backups is to run a nightly backup job using Windows to an external drive, so you get a total daily sync of your whole system. Real time updates for home users is overkill.

[Sotaris]

tldr: don't use Onedrive

[Dzian]

This is quite a common issue. Not just with one drive but any file sync software that syncs your users directory.

It doesn't matter where you install the game all the user data will be still bebstored in your mygames folder.

If you want to use one drive just create a couple of exceptions (ignore list) and tell it to ignore both the logs folder and ffxivpatch folders.

It's a pretty common reason why people's updates can be slow because one drive or whatever is trying to sync the ffxivpatch folder while the game client is making changes to it and causes conflicts.

Disabling it entirely might not be a great idea if it's your only real backup.

[Catwho]

This is quite a common issue. Not just with one drive but any file sync software that syncs your users directory.

It doesn't matter where you install the game all the user data will be still bebstored in your mygames folder.

If you want to use one drive just create a couple of exceptions (ignore list) and tell it to ignore both the logs folder and ffxivpatch folders.

It's a pretty common reason why people's updates can be slow because one drive or whatever is trying to sync the ffxivpatch folder while the game client is making changes to it and causes conflicts.

Disabling it entirely might not be a great idea if it's your only real backup.

Agreed. I'm old fashioned and I have a nightly backup to the 4TB external drive instead, as well as manual scrapes of the whole system every few months in a directory structure. One Drive has its uses - it's quite handy to sync certain common files from my desktop to my laptop, but the majority of my more important work file backups are done to a shared Google drive these days.

Poking holes in the exception log is probably an excellent idea for those without another backup solution.

[technole]

I'd just exclude that folder from Onedrive. The config files are constantly being updated by the game, for good reason.

Most people don't know when you do /isearch to search your retainers, those local log files contain that information needed for it, not a poll of the retainer on the servers. Every time you fetch your retainer the game constantly updates the store inventory to your PC so it can use that search cache. Rarely the game will say it has no confidence of your retainer inventory with answers of ??? but that can happen when it can't save the file.

Basically, just block onedrive from backing it up. Besides the real character/system backups should be uploaded using the game client.

[Wasselin]

I hate OneDrive. This adds another reason why it's the worst.

[Vahlnir]

I hate OneDrive. This adds another reason why it's the worst.

Yeah, I just don't use it. I get its purpose, but I got tired of it having to sync literally everything I did, whether it was an Mp3 album I just bought and downloaded or game data. lol I don't have time to wait around for Onedrive to catch up.

[Nethereal]

I find one drive is the most convenient way for me to get files across multiple devices though I wouldn't use it for backup.