It's taking me WAY TOO LONG to connect to servers / change maps - Games

Can someone tell me what influences the amount of time this takes? I would think connection speed would be the primary factor, but I've had the same internet service for four years, and it hasn't been bad until about a week ago. Still, browsing the internet and downloading things are as fast as ever. I only have problems with TF2. My computer's hardware hasn't changed, except that I got a new video card about a month ago. If anything, I'd think that would make things faster. Also, about a year ago, I went from a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor to a quad-core 2.4 GHz processor, and after this change, it seemed like loading times were outrageously fast. I'd get into servers almost instantly, and there would always be 20+ seconds on the "waiting for players" timer when the map changed. But now it's [b]so slow[/b]..... [b]I get kicked for being AFK before I'm even in a server[/b]. I have to either join servers that don't kick AFK people (which I don't want to do) or sit there in the loading screen moving the mouse and pushing an odd button or two to ensure that I am indeed at my computer. The other day I started connecting to a server, then I walked about a block down the street to buy a sub, and when I walked back, the loading screen was only just at the "retrieving server info" phase. Even then it took about 3 more minutes to finish loading. I tried to connect to a game just now, and I sat there staring at "parsing game info" with three lines in the loading bar for [b]8 minutes[/b]. This shouldn't even be taking me one minute. It should be around 30 seconds at most. I didn't wait to see how long it took to [b]finish[/b] loading. Is there something I can do to shorten these outrageous loading times? I've already tried verificating my local files, and defragumalating my game cache. Also checkerfied my hard drive for fragumalation.

How much RAM do you have? Check your background processes to make sure nothing's taking up a huge amount. Map loading is very slow when it has to do a lot of paging

same with me, i think it is your RAM.... RAM will make it load quicker, and also after the engie update tf2 became very poorly optimized, they said they would bring an update out soon to increase performance speed. [editline]8th November 2010[/editline] ninjas -.-

Well I've got 2 GB, but I am using Windows XP still, so I figured that would be plenty. How do I find out how my RAM is being used? Actually I think I found it, in task manager. Right now Firefox is using the most, at about 135,000 K Steam is right behind that at 91,000 K Everything below those is pretty insubstantial.

Most people use 4GB nowadays, but 2GB should be enough to handle TF2; saying that, they have added tonnes of shit to TF2 lately which could increase the amount of data that has to pass through your RAM greatly. The most logical thing to do at this moment is to get some more RAM, make sure you've got 64-bit or whatever

2GB is enough with Windows XP for TF2. Are you guys insane? Even if he had 512Mb of ram, it shouldn't take him 10 minutes to load a single map.

Source engine is awful with this. When I connect to server I can't even open the overlay, while in Bad Company 2 (for example) maps load much faster and I can alt+tab while loading without any stuttering.

So I can't fix it? I just have to hope Valve is going to update the game to be better optimized?

[QUOTE=Loofiloo;25942495]So I can't fix it? I just have to hope Valve is going to update the game to be better optimized?[/QUOTE] What most people have been doing recently.