Improving latency

[mujo]

As of late, I've been experiencing more lag than usual. I really want to blame my ISP on this one. However, I was wondering if anyone has any tips for improving ping on Ville Servers? I know there's not really too much I can do, it all depends on how many hops, and how good they are. But I have not changed anything and my average ping on Server 1 went from 30 to 70. And on Ville VII my ping increased from 80 to 110. Last night it was reaching 150, making it quite unplayable: not due to the ping measurement, but rather the actual amount of lag I was receiving. This is happening on pretty much any server I'm playing on, not just Ville Servers. The only explanation I can think of, is that my ISP changed a hop on me, for the worse.

Would replacing my cable modem make a difference? The increase in lag just happened recently. I've always been able to ping Ville servers quite well. I currently have Time Warner Cable, and my speeds are 1.5 Mbps down, and 356Kbps up. Anyway, the other day, my connection completely dropped after lagging out of a game. Thats when this all started. The lights on my modem were stagnant.

Anyway, thanks for listening. I know this is more of a rant, its pretty much out of my control. However, I was hoping for some insider tips

[vitz]

Do you have access to the statistics from your cablemodem (upstream/downstream power level, SNR ratio, uncorrected codewords)? This would be the first thing I would do a quick sanity check on with respect to the connection dropping out. Your cablemodem will reset if it receives too many uncorrectable codewords within a certain amount of time. If you do have access, check your system uptime to see if the cablemodem is resetting. Usually cablemodems have a web page you can access to check it's statistics. Barring that, they (almost) all support SNMP but that's a bit more complicated to fetch data from.

I don't think your cablemodem, though, would attribute to your latency issues. More often than not this is due to some failing network hardware along the way. Do a few traceroutes to the IP address of several servers (Ville and otherwise). Look for any hops in the output where the latency jumps by a huge order of magnitude (ie: an increase between one hop to the next of > 50ms). Check if this bad hop spot is consistent across traceroutes to several different places. Post the output if you feel comfortable doing so.

ie:

Code: Select all

C:\>tracert -d 63.209.35.63

Tracing route to 63.209.35.63 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2     7 ms     7 ms     5 ms  10.103.192.1
  3     7 ms    10 ms     7 ms  167.3.2.1
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  6     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  7     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  8    10 ms     9 ms    10 ms  69.31.95.141
  9    16 ms    16 ms    15 ms  69.22.142.89
 10    20 ms    16 ms    15 ms  69.31.31.154
 11    30 ms    29 ms    29 ms  69.22.142.105
 12    56 ms    50 ms    52 ms  69.22.142.117
 13    50 ms    49 ms    49 ms  69.22.142.114
 14    51 ms    49 ms    50 ms  69.31.63.38
 15    50 ms    53 ms    50 ms  63.209.35.63

Trace complete.

[mujo]

Question on the tracert, as its been awhile since I've used it. there are three columns of ping times...does this mean the server gets pinged three times?

[mujo]

Yeah, I found a few consistent bad hops, is there anything I can do about this? Other than complaint o my ISP?

[vitz]

[quote="mujo";p="167199"]Question on the tracert, as its been awhile since I've used it. there are three columns of ping times...does this mean the server gets pinged three times?[/quote]

Yes, that's correct. Traceroute sends batches of three packets at a time of packets with successively longer TTL (time-to-live) values. The three columns are the latency times for each packet in the 3 packet batch.

[quote="mujo";p="167199"]Yeah, I found a few consistent bad hops, is there anything I can do about this? Other than complaint o my ISP?[/quote]
It depends. Are you sure the hop is within your ISP's address space? If so, then you can try notifying them, however they may not do much about it (some ISP's are better than others). Provide them with as much supporting information as you can.

[mujo]

when you mean address space, you mean the ISP's actual server? Because i have TWC, and the bad hop is not a TWC or Road Runner server.

my ping jumps from 29 to 89 on the tenth hop to server I

[MMX]

Did you ever reset your modem since? Most modems also run a small Operating system. Maybe it just needs a reboot. I would suggest to unplug the power cord wait for a minute and replug it back in.

Also try a different modem if you can.

Maybe a thunderstorm made it unreliable.

Try to reboot/replug everything you can that is involved to connect your PC to the internet. If you have a separate router, also reboot it. You can do everything at once, though I would suggest to do it one by one and recheck if the situation improved. That way you might don't have to touch everything if it occurs again.

[mujo]

Yeah MMX. That was the first thing I did after my modem seemed to "crash". I rebooted it and the router, separately.

[metacide]

When I had Comcast as an ISP we had a lot of problems with our packets getting sent across bad Relays. We did tracerts and figured out who owned the Relay in question, collected their phone number, called them found out who was in charge of the Relays in question, and figured out what would need to be done to get them in proper working order.

We gave all of that info to Comcast and they did exactly nothing with it. The owners of the actual Relays wouldnt help us because all service requests had to come from Comcast. We escalated the issue up to Director level, we were really tired of getting lag spikes, and still it went no where.

What does all this mean? You might be better off getting a different ISP. We have Verizon now and are much happier.

[vitz]

[quote="mujo";p="167205"]when you mean address space, you mean the ISP's actual server? Because i have TWC, and the bad hop is not a TWC or Road Runner server.

my ping jumps from 29 to 89 on the tenth hop to server I[/quote]

Yes, I meant IP address space owned by your ISP. (As an aside, you can figure out who own's specific IP address space by doing a lookup in ARIN, http://ws.arin.net)

It sounds like you've already determined it's outside of their network. If you could share, what was the IP just before the 29->89ms increase and the one right after (the ninth and tenth hops from your de.scription). In general, the problem is usually the router right before the large increase (ie: the ninth one that shows 29ms is probably the one that's failing or is bandwidth saturated at it's egress to the tenth hop)

[MasterChef]

[quote="metacide";p="167248"]Comcast[/quote]


That's all you needed to say

[mujo]

9 27ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 207.88.15.26.ptr.us.xo.net [207.88.15.26]


10 89ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 206.111.0.154.ptr.us.xo.net [206.111.0.154]


There ya go, not sure what you can do about this information. Time Warner basically laughed at me.