Running AMD FX-6100 6-core 3.5GHz
16GB RAM
AMD R9-270 4GB video
Win10-1803 (build 17134.285) fully patched
Paid up Norton Security AV (EQ and MQ excluded) and Windows Defender disabled.
ISBoxer CPU Control (6 EQ Clients sharing 5 cores, 1 core left virgin for Windows use) 44fps foreground, 22fps background
(I know it's abnormal to leave a core unused but my lag became less severe after unbinding Core 0! And the game was unplayable when I tried to dedicate 1 core per client!)
At one point yesterday when starting KA 11.007 I was dropping to 3 fps. After doing a reboot and ending the Windows SuperFetch task everything in-game seemed to return to normal. I use the Task Manager but have not been able to find anything extraordinary except the one time that SuperFetch was hogging the CPU.
A few weeks ago I could use the ISBoxer key repeater to start
KissAssist on all 6 clients simultaneously with no problem and no freezing. Lately I have to start each one by itself before moving on to the next one or the game freezes solid for some seconds.
At least one time I was lagging badly and simply camped to desktop all my chars, then stopped all EQ related software, then restarted it all one by one and the lag ceased.
So whatever is happening is not consistent. And I just read this morning that Microsoft is re-releasing the September cumulative security patch for Windows 10 because they forgot something. I'm always suspicious of bad Microshaft code!
Whatever is happening with lag is not memory related because I never exceed about 6GB of memory in-use. It's more like some loop is occasionally entering a race condition.
Edited to add: I shut this machine down every night. And not a sleep or hibernation but a true cold "no power" shutdown. I've been burnt way too many times on those hibernation events. In fact any time I work on a Win10 machine I open a command prompt as admin and type "powercfg -h off" to permanently disable hibernation mode and to delete the leftover hibernat.fil from the root of c:.