Lag/Latency

DoubleK · April 29th, 2003, 09:15 PM

I play Unreal Tournament 155/55 lgi at the very competitive level and have done so for 2 years. I know about everything there is to tweak or do to UT and outside of all that sometimes nothing beats a reinstallation of UT as things tend to corrupt due to new/conflicting files or Pures.

I can no longer play competitively due to shot lag that is impossible to gauge as its constantly changing which led me to believe packet loss is the culprit since I have done everything outside of reinstalling windows that I know off. Single Player obviously plays fine with no lag to speak off so I pretty much can rule out hardware issues on my end.

I have been to Dsl reports where everything checks out fine. Modem is configured and operating within specs per a Charter Communications tech. Used Dr Tcp to to bring my rwin into their reccomended range (24,000) opposed to what Windows XP home had it at 37,000. Wouldnt make that much of a difference anyways as my understanding of XP is that these settings are dynamic in this OS.

I have heard every explanation from my ISP and people on Dsl reports, the most common being that Dos prompts are unreliable especially when the router in question doesnt accept icmp requests but the fact remains I have all of these traces that will show horrible spikes frequently across the backbone my provider hooks up too, Att.net. Normal would be between 20-50ms and I will see it spike on Average anywhere from 400-2500ms which would indicate to me an overloaded network on their end as the pings come back into the expected range once it is off of Att.net. Pings show packetloss but it is explained to me this COULD be because that router doesnt accept icmp requests which undoubtedly true concerns me because under the native version of Dos in XP Home the Pings to these specific points will read Destination Net Unreachable which leads me to believe that that router doesnt accept icmp requests but also it will **Request Timed Out** which along with the spiking I feel this hop to be the problem.

Could anyone offer me any advice how to convince my isp and Att.net that there is a problem. Are there any internet stability monitoring tools that would be a good indication of packet loss lag/latency problems? Thanks.

ArcticFox · May 2nd, 2003, 04:59 AM

Since you have Comcast (att got owned by them) and they are huge with bad customer service, I would suggest grabbing a freind who plays UT and have him connect to your cable to see if he get's the same problem. Likewise with you going to a DSL or whatnot equipped household. AT&T blocks incoming requests because they don't want people hosting servers on their connections, so this may be why your having ICMP issues. Coincidentally, I just got back from a friend's place who uses ATT, and he wanted to host a Warcraft 3 game but no, ATT has to be dumb and have firewalls at their hubs. I use Verizon DSL and of course I can't go over 90kbps, but at least I can host stuff.

DoubleK · May 2nd, 2003, 07:18 AM

Well I more or less know that sporadic packet loss is the problem. What I need I suppose is to find who exactly the culprit is so I can at least harp to the right people. I have Charter and their customer service is less then admirable but there again who's is? Att.net seems to be the backbone for my isp and I believe the problem lies with them but I need proof that these bassfishes will listen to. I recently purchased Igi-2 and it repeatedly shows my ping spiking between 1800-2500 and up to 35% packet loss and although I do not put much faith in videogame connection monitors I find it ironic that that is about the range for packetloss/ping that I would see on Att.net in my extensive Dos Prompts. There again, Iam no networking guru but wish one would help me, at least point me in the right direction for what is needed so they will listen.

djlar · May 2nd, 2003, 07:32 AM

hey i too had same problems when playing battlefield
1942 so here are a couple of sites that helped me >>>http://www.winxpfix.com/ ......and anothe for some good tweaks http://www.winxpfix.com/ maybe it will help maybe not

djlar · May 2nd, 2003, 07:34 AM

opps sorry for the reat of the link it was supposed to be this one http://www.tweaktown.com/document.ph...Id=420&dPage=1

DVNT1 · May 2nd, 2003, 08:24 AM

DoubleK: sorry to hear of your problems. I'm big on competetive AA playing with latenecy and packet loss being a mojor enemy.

What you have concluded is completely right. It is very likely your ISP or their provider has at least one router's that is just overloaded.

Running tracert for multiple days during the same time you often play. Save the data to a file and send it to the ISP so they have actual data to check.

example: tracert 63.111.75.165 >c:\trace1.txt

If your ISP won't fix it, an obvious idea is to try a different ISP.

DoubleK · May 2nd, 2003, 04:38 PM

Thanks alot, that is pretty much what I have concluded. I have saved multiple logs like that and they had the nerve to ask me for screen shots as text logs can be "altered". I assured them I dont need more bandwidth rather a stable connection. I did speak with them today finally and it was determined by the network engineer that Att.net (their backbone) was the culprit on the ping spiking/packet loss. I was told their wasnt much they could do about it to which I replied I will make sure I forget to mail the check this month and they can have their modem back, I can only get 384/128 with SBC but if the connection is stable will undoubtedely game better than 1500/128 I have now on Cable.