Unfortunately none of this is that simple and I can tell you that all these things are issues, no two ways about it. Its not that a server is "loading", its that the server is loaded down that causes these things and this is not surprising to anyone in IT. Load balancing, server ram, SQL configuration and many other things come into play.
I am playing now at 3am EST and everything is fast, load times, screen shots, ball flight, and the meter is perfect. Do you want to take a stab at explaining why that is when it wasn't at 10pm PST? And why its like this every Friday and Sunday night, and lately seems to be spilling over into other nights like tonight?
I know the answer, there is really only one conclusion you can draw.
Here are some small interesting observations I made:
At 9pm PST, standing at first tee at St. A average CPU 65%, pretty high. During this time, some CPU spikes were noticable, like 3 in one minute up to 90-95%.
Ball flight and and screen loading 85-100%.
Standing on fairway 50%, spikes occuring here also.
Dragging aim around 80%
Standing on green 86% average.
These are pretty high numbers and yes my computer is running bare bones, game booster (shuts off a bunch of stuff) and configured properly, my computer is just not that new, which has no bearing on play during the OFF-PEAK hours as I can play trouble free just fine for HOURS on end, really from 3am to 9pm no issues, that is an awfully long time and I have played anywhere in that time frame for months, no issues, as I am not working.
So now, tonight still, at 1:30am EST/10:30pm PST, when many people have gone to bed, take a big wild guess at what happened to my numbers?
Any idea why? I know, I know exactly why. And no, its not some bot or my virus program updating like another user would like us to believe and has insinuated, on Friday I seen terrible performance for 6 hours straight, nothing runs for that long and not every night either, not to mention it varies from one night to the next.
Here they are from 1:30, compare to above.
Standing on tee box 30%, spikes up to 58% much lower overall
Ball flight and screen loading is the same, as expected.
Fairway 3%. THREE. Talk about a drop here, I left it for 2 minutes solid. Still spikes happening, normal up to 20%, one up to 70%.
Aim is the same as expected.
Standing on green only a little less at 82%.
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What does this mean, possibly nothing and other users have already reported problems with the game when they NEVER get more than 20% CPU usage. There are many more factors to consider here but this alone was interesting at any rate and what causes the spikes? friends? server activity? Note with with the game not running there are NO spikes.
To me none of these numbers matter and I knew what the results were going to be before I did the test, the bottom line was clear from the beginning. When someone plays at all hours of the day and only has problems in a 3 hour window and that happens to be when the most people are playing, I mean come on.
See it really doesnt matter how good someone's computer is. A bad computer means issues at anytime, and will be much worse in peak hours. A good computer means that when things on WGT's end are good, your game will run fine. When WGT servers are loaded down, you can have the best newest lighting fast machine out there with the highest speed connection and you are still going to see issues, that's just the facts and people with those machines have already attested to exactly that. Further to this, I guarantee you that if you ran the game at 8pm PST on a dedicated server, over the internet, and only allowed ONE user onto the server, he would have no issues, and again that only leads to the same conclusion.
Not all that informative and very simplified but here is a small overview of the why, see the 2nd point, which is the one in question and point 3 within that is the only solution for me, other than WGT doing some things on their end:
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000620.htm