Latency and disconnection issues

[FlavorFlavius]

Is there anything I can do about the lag and disconnects I've been having? I'm not a network pro but I don't see anything wrong on my end. I also did a trace to the starforge server with ping plotter and it looks like the problem starts on hop 6 or 7. Is this something that is caused by my ISP?

[proxos666 · Accepted solution]

@FlavorFlavius

Your issue may be congestion at that comcast gateway in which case your issue should only usually be evident during nightly peak hour timings.

See if something like www.wtfast.com has any impact on what you are seeing, it has a 14 day free trial i believe but if this stabilises things then it is a bandaid in the short term.

It also provides additional connection stats and gives you graphs of what your default conditions are and how much it is helping. 

[proxos666]

@FlavorFlavius

Ensure the trace is done while playing the game and the issue is occurring

concerning is the higher average ping at hop 6 being 164 ms and see how that behavior continues to all other hops forward, this means those hops are being affected by what ever is being seen at hop 6 , off hand this is likely an indication of an issue at the comcast gateway at hop 5 and their handover to level 3. either way this is an issue for comcast to address.

[proxos666]

@FlavorFlavius

Ensure you are testing with a wired connection too 

just wanted to mention the average ping at your hop 1 is also higher then i usually like to see as yours are running at 12 ms. 

my average ping connecting wireless is 0ms usually anything over 5ms warrants further investigation, this could be due to poor wireless signal or a modem struggling with the traffic due to firewall etc etc.

hence why connecting with an ethernet cable and see if the disconnects still occur as this eliminates the wireless as a cause, but saying that the spikes appearing as mentioned in my previous posts at hop 6 are concerning.

what is occurring is hard to pin point as ICMP packets are low priority packets but even then the behavior that is affecting the forward hops from hop 6 is affecting the packets to the game servers so is more likely the cause here. 

hope that makes sense.

[FlavorFlavius]

Thanks for the reply. I should have mentioned that I use the wifi provided by my condo association, so its being shared with other people in my building. It also prevents me from using a wired connection. So the 12 ms ping at hop 1 might be due to traffic on our network. But they upgraded all of the access points in my building a couple years ago and I always have a strong wifi signal. Would the shared bandwidth from comcast cause the ping to spike like it does at hop 6/7? I'm just trying to figure out how to best describe the issue if I have to contact them for support.

[proxos666]

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@FlavorFlavius wrote:

 Would the shared bandwidth from comcast cause the ping to spike like it does at hop 6/7? I'm just trying to figure out how to best describe the issue if I have to contact them for support.

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No , the general rule of thumb is if something occurs at a hop, say like as seen at hop 7 , if it doesnt affect the hops after it, it can usually be ignored.

given the average ping is increased to 164ms yet should be around 17ms at hop 6 and this elevated average continues to the end, this indicates it is affecting the route to the servers and will very very likely affect the game as well with massive ping spiking etc

as it is seen at hop 6 and not at hop 5 it would indicate it is occurring between hop 5 and 6 and that includes the change in networks between comcast and level 3.

hope that helps

[proxos666 · Accepted solution]

@FlavorFlavius

Your issue may be congestion at that comcast gateway in which case your issue should only usually be evident during nightly peak hour timings.

See if something like www.wtfast.com has any impact on what you are seeing, it has a 14 day free trial i believe but if this stabilises things then it is a bandaid in the short term.

It also provides additional connection stats and gives you graphs of what your default conditions are and how much it is helping. 

[FlavorFlavius]

@proxos666

Just wanted to follow up on this. I tried using wtfast and it seemed to improve the connection and lag issues, but I was only able to get a 3 day trial so didn't get to confirm that. I think it routed my path to the star forge server around Level3.net which helped, although there were still minor periodic lag spikes. I agree that this is probably due to using a shared internet connection during peak hours and it's just going to be a limitation of the network no matter if I use a vpn/gpn. So I will probably just need to live with it and subscribe to wtfast, or pay for a dedicated cable/dsl connection. Here is a report from wtfast - I couldn't find where it indicates whether or not there was an improvement, so I was just relying on my impression of in-game performance.

Thanks again to proxos for your help!