Lag, packet loss and my cat walking on my keyboard

[chamychan]

yes those are the things that get me frustrated when I'm totally in my zone, trying to dance oh so elegantly in my monster party.

My cat thinks that he's helping me but the first 2 problems simply won't justify. I have no problems with the connection 2 weeks ago and i never have background programs running.

I'm running a dual core Radeon GTS 8800 graphics card on a cable high speed connection. (not a computer genius here) Is there anyway to find out the root of my problem and to simply optimize my settings to make the experience better? plz help, i'd really appreciate it.

chamychan

[DW_Bomzin]

It is my understanding that there is a problem with a router on the way to our host , just outside of it somewhere . All we can do is bitch alittle louder and maybe someone will take notice .

When the problem is happening try a trace route and see where the problem lies .

[DW_Ant]

lol I have cat problems myself. When they really bother me, I just fill up the cat bowl with food so they can eat....

jk, I just let them sit on my lap :cat:

[DW_Damaged]

Chamy, I work with computers and servers all day long. I'm not sure where your located and a trace route could help pin point the bottle neck. If you dont know how to do this go to a Dos prompt and type tracert 208.100.49.220 (which should be the ip address of DW's server) and you will see where the problem may be. Even though I live in Florida I sometimes go out to California and then to Chicago. I use to play on UI's server and all of a sudden I was getting packet loss about wave 10. I swore it was Bell South and there hardware but after having them put me on a different circuit, rewire my house and replace my DSL modem I stll had the problem. At this point I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out the problem. I went out and bought a new Video card, MB, CPU. Memory, and router but at about wave 10 hello packet loss. It drove me nuts for about a month and knowing there was nothing left to replace I was at a loss. Now remember I work with computers all day and the last thing I thought of was power supply. I had a 550w PS and it never gave me any problems. My other games played fine but UT was the game I played the most. So I decided to buy an 800w PS just to see if this was the problem and guess what Problem solved. Not sure if my pain helps you out but if all of a sudden your having packet loss and you run a tracert to the server and dont see a problem and other things are working fine you just might want to try another PS. The worse that happens is it doesnt solve the problem and you return it.

Good luck and I hope you are able to get the problem fixed.

[chamychan]

thanks for all your help, I tried to trace the router/ip however u call it and all these alien language came up. I have absolutely no idea what this is since it is not nearly close to what i do professionally. I'm sure it could mean something to you guys.

and as for what damaged mentioned, i dont think my problem is the power supply since i installed a new 700W one after i got a new graphics card. The combination produced great results on Crysis so i think this is more of a connection problem.

I heard that some ISP are secretly reducing the bandwidth of some of their clients due to their Bittorrent usage. Could that be one of the reason? coz i'm definitely guilty (sentence to life) in that department.





Tracing route to ip220.208-100-49.static.steadfast.net [208.100.49.220]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 8 ms 6 ms 7 ms 10.55.224.1
3 7 ms 6 ms 5 ms gig-0-3-nycmnyc-rtr2.nyc.rr.com [24.29.97.89]
4 11 ms 8 ms 6 ms tengig-12-0-0-nycmnya-rtr1.nyc.rr.com [24.29.97.
9]
5 9 ms 10 ms 14 ms tenge-0-3-0-nwrknjmd-rtr.nyc.rr.com [24.29.97.6]

6 13 ms 16 ms 14 ms ae-4-0.cr0.nyc30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.78]
7 9 ms 7 ms 10 ms ae-0-0.cr0.nyc20.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.27]
8 68 ms 68 ms 40 ms ae-3-0.cr0.chi30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.25]
9 35 ms 35 ms 105 ms ae-1-0.pr0.chi10.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.155]
10 33 ms 35 ms 32 ms ae0-302.cr1.ord1.us.nlayer.net [69.31.111.125]
11 40 ms 36 ms 35 ms vl71.ar1.ord1.us.nlayer.net [69.31.111.134]
12 33 ms 33 ms 32 ms as32748.vl116.ar1.ord1.us.nlayer.net [69.31.110.
26]
13 37 ms 34 ms 40 ms ip220.208-100-49.static.steadfast.net [208.100.4
9.220]

Trace complete.


chamychan

[DW_BrainPan]

Hey Chamy,

Without getting into too much detail about tracert, what you are seeing is the different hops (routers) that your packets take going from you to the server. The first number in each row (0,1,2,...13) is the hop number, the next three numbers (Each followed by ms) are the times (in milliseconds) it took that router to reply back to you (3 each because tracert sends packets out 3 at a time), next you have the resolved name of the hop/router, and last the IP address (i.e. unresolved name) of the hop/router.

Now that you know what your looking at...it probably doesn't help you much. I don't see a problem with that output. And the real kicker --> even if I did see a problem, what are either of us gonna do about it?

Another command line program you can use is pathping. This will give you more information. In particular it will give you info about latency and packet loss between links and at those routers in your tracert hops. We still have the same ultimate problem though ---> if you see there is packet loss at some hop/router, what can you do about it?

Here's some good news (possibly). I encounter problems when connecting to the servers that I think is the router problem Bomzin is talking about. When I get it I often loose connection completely and cannot reconnect for a while. When I run tracert and pathping I get problems at hop/router 65.83.237.183 (e.g. it never resolves the name, and I get 100% packet loss at this hop/router). I suspect that this is the problem router Bomzin speaks of, but I don't see this IP address in you tracert.

So you may not have this particular connection problem, but unfortunately that still leaves you with a problem elsewhere. Where that is I don't know.

-BP :faroah:

p.s. I'd blame it on the cat.

[DW_Damaged]

Chamy,

Yep your trace route looks fine and Brain gave you some great info. I didnt want to fill you with a whole lot of tech talk since I was not sure what your level of knowledge was. With that said your PS should be fine at 700w but then again I though my 550w was good as well. I would call up your ISP and have them look into it if it isnt resolved in a few days. As far as the bittorrent downloads go yep ISP's are throttling back the speed but this should not prevent you from playing UT. But then again the Bittorrent police could be watching you using a hidden web cam in your cat :)

Hope you get things worked out.

[DW_ToxicWaste]

Don't forget about the NVidia driver problems with UT2004 (although I'm not 100% sure what a dual core radeon 8800 GTS is :drunken: )

However, I hear that 177 fixes it.

Rich (TW)

[DW_Cheapshot]

There has been a problem the last few days.
at any given time at least 42 percent of the mash players have loss.
It it seen on the last 2 to 3 waves when data traffic is at its highest.
This is what I have been seeing along with many others. The trace
always shows in the same place for me.