Macintosh

On and off for the last few months I've been having a problem with debilitating lag spikes caused by interacting with text-filled UI windows. Which is basically every single window in the game making it generally unplayable. Depending on how much text is in the window, the game freezes for 2 to 20 seconds. Switching or even trying to type in chat channels after being logged in for more than 15-20 minutes is basically impossible. It's been described here, here, and here, on and off since 2011. It's only happened on my 15" Early 2011 running 10.7, never on my 13" Mid 2010 running 10.6. It came and went with no particular pattern through various patches. Uninstalling and reinstalling didn't do anything, neither did clearing caches, trashing prefs, or anything else. I even totally reinstalled OS X twice, and it still happened.

After going through the forums for a few hours I found a few potential leads. Posts 15 and 17 in this thread and this post gave me some ideas. I tried a few things, and it's almost totally fixed for me.

I have no idea how long this will work, or even if it'll work for anyone else. But it might be worth a shot if you've got a similar issue. I also have no idea if one or more of these steps will hose your computer, so don't do it if you're not comfortable with that possibility.

1.)Open Font Book and validate all your fonts.

2.)Disable any fonts that are problematic.

3.)Just turning off the dodgy fonts didn't fix anything for me. I ended up having to disable almost everything except the fonts OS X wouldn't let me disable. It's probably wise to start with disabling just the foreign fonts you never use. Again, be careful doing this.

4.)Delete the file "ftfontcache" in /Users/username/Library/Application Support/EVE Online. Make a backup if you want.

5.)Enable the resource cache.

6.)Turn off "Highlight My Messages" and "Highlight Infantry Messages" in every chat channel you have open.

7.)Try not to leave windows minimized. Chat channels, the notepad, and the corporation window cause me the most problems.

The order of those may or may not matter, but I figured I'd present it in the order I did it in case it is. I also have no idea if every step is required.

After doing this, the client works nearly perfectly for me. I can stay logged in for hours with no almost no problems. There's still a little bit of lag switching chat channels, but it's nothing like before. If there's no minimized windows, it's rock solid. I can switch between extremely busy channels with hours of scrollback or tag-heavy MOTDs with zero trouble whatsoever. Everything works properly. It's just as good as running it on Windows.

Unfortunately I don't think this will help the freezing problem (which I'm thankfully unaffected by), but I hope it can help someone.