Just an idea for your engineer(s - plural, hopefully ) to chew on:
Each player in a chat has a portrait. Specifically capsuleers have individual portraits. This portrait is only loaded once as far as I'm aware.

So in my theory things go down like this:
Start game, open chat, receive chat member portraits. Join match, portrait still exists and appears to stay in RAM for the whole time. TQ's smallest portrait is (as an example) a 128x128 px one. This is, in the case of my lovely Caldari portrait to the left (also a 128x128 px portrait) 6 kByte per portrait. I don't know how much memory is reserved for chat-portraits, but if you keep the wrong channels open it will be easy to pick up 100 kByte worth of portraits - which are loaded in the 128 mByte GPU memory while in battle.

Double-check whether Dust players actually share the same portrait in memory or whether each individual merc has his own individual portrait, too. Stuff like this happens.

I can confirm this.
I had two freezes so far in my tests, which I never have otherwise.
The last one required a hard reset (dual shock buttons did not work), and a file check...

I switched Aeon's channels which sadly were empty (or more than 50, but no activity) to equal amount of busy channels with a lot of chat going on.

Writing this as my PS3 comes back to life [:roll:

Edit: Ugghhh.... Make that 3 hard freezes

Ok, due to the hard freezes I am aborting further testing, and will delete all extra added chat channels.

During my games I could not detect any major degradation of either frame-rate or lag, and all my games were were playable.
(I only played pub matches though)

I should mention all crashes occurred between matches (browsing menues), as the squad finder or mission list.
Generally I played about 3-4 matches between freezes.

Regardless, there is something fishy going on with a lot of chat channels....

I have to admit I did not have any problem on the Warbarge (brought up the chat window several times), but I would not have been surprised if it happened

The last hard freeze was while browsing the daily missions.

CCP never shared what they did to optimize it, just that they did it.
You're going to have to ask around within CCP.

Short update

The simple number of chat channels does not seem to be a problem.

A) We still recommend closing them and deactivating voice if you are not using it.
B) We are doing testing on the texture quality, and would like to be able to recommend to players what to expect in frames by tuning it down.

However, when a player does some actions, there is a "refresh all chat members" call that happens across all channels, even if it's not an active channel. We will be trying to stop that from happening as it can cripple the performance in large alliance chats.

We will also be testing whether the icons/portraits are causing load issues. They do not seem to be.

Based on testing we will probably instill two clean up rules:

1) All email older than 30 days will be deleted during downtime. Store hatemail by forwarding to alts, or take a picture, it lasts longer.

2) All channels that have had no activity in a certain period will be deleted during downtime.



I also have a question, in the many threads, I remember someone mentioning some work done on bringing up Corp MEmber info, versus the Contact list being super slow to load. This optimization happened before I was on the team so help would be appreciated.