Testing cable internet connection

Ford Prefect · Post by **Ford Prefect** » Sun Mar 02, 2003 1:22 pm

I seem to have a lot of network loss when playing games on the internet including D3. When I die or there is a lot of action my loss spikes to 20% or so. I used to blame my P2 300mz cpu but now I have upgraded to an AMD 1300 and still the losses come and go. I tried playing the demo version of BF1942 but was plauged by connection problem warnings and although no one told me for sure I was booted from a couple of servers possibly for causing lag.
My question is how do I test my connection for loss (ping seems okay)?

------------------
Experience is something you get right after you needed it most.

Max_T · Post by **Max_T** » Sun Mar 02, 2003 1:33 pm

www.dslreports.com has some basic tools to do that.
Also try messing around with your rwin and mtu settings.

------------------
Max_T

Spidey · Post by **Spidey** » Sun Mar 02, 2003 3:48 pm

Sooo...you finally figured out that its "you" and not "me"....

Well thatâ??s a first step....

(Yes I am referring to your comments during the games)

If itâ??s any consolationâ?¦I find that most if not all Canadian players have bad lag/loss problems during the gameâ?¦.(far worse then European players for example)â?¦

I wish you guys could figure out this thing, because every time I see that maple leaf on a ship I cringeâ?¦.

Luckâ?¦.


DBB Lightning Rod

zapped · Post by **zapped** » Sun Mar 02, 2003 4:36 pm

My lag & packet loss on AOL/TimeWarner Roadrunner here in Austin, TX has worsened considerably lately. Techs have been out to monitor & adjust transmit/receive levels and do firmware patches to my cable modem, but it's still much worse than 6 months or a year ago.

I monitor wassup with PingPlotter. Despite the name, it's more of a traceroute graphing tool/plotter than simply a ping-plotter. You can use the freeware version as I did for a while, but the full registered version ($15) is awesome. It graphs the traceroutes and saves the information for later analysis.

I typically run 4 pingplots simultaneously, where each session pings its destination at 10 second intervals. I ping another local ISP's webserver, ftp.sgi.com, [url=http://www.yahoo.com,]www.yahoo.com,[/url] and my local roadrunner news server. When they all have simultaneous packet loss along the way I know it's my connect that's messed up. Naturally, what I see is nasty loss & sporadic inability to connect to remote servers during peak evening & weekend hours

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Mon Mar 03, 2003 12:57 am

Have you got a hardware modem? HW Modems are known to ping lower (up to 20%), reduce loss and reduce CPU loading. Lucent Winmodem? Chuck it out - it aint for gaming...

But until then, disable "Software Compression", make sure your FIFO buffers are 3/4 and full, put AT&F in the modem string, and change maximum connection speed to 57,600.

------------------
"How many escape pods are there?" "None Sir!" "You counted them?" "Twice Sir!"
Get D3 HELP at http://planetdescent.com/d3help
 BAN THE PHOENIX!

Bonz · Post by **Bonz** » Mon Mar 03, 2003 6:41 am

Mobius should learn how to read, I do believe he is having cable issues not dialup

------------------

ixion · Post by **ixion** » Mon Mar 03, 2003 11:52 am

ha! I was thinking the same thing, lol!

Anyway, I've noticed in the past 6 mos. my RR cable performance (in gaming) has degraded. The download rates are still top-notch, but gaming loss will spike well above 30%. Pings will go from 60ms to 600ms regularly. I shortened the coax cable to the cable modem (used a longer enet cable to the modem), and that actually helped downloads alot, haven't had a chance to test out the gaming advantages...

I also have been getting alot of hits recently. Basically in a 5 minutes period I had 20 attack attempts... to me, this seems like a lot.. maybe not?

------------------
Planet Descent Staffer
http://www.planetdescent.com

kurupt · Post by **kurupt** » Mon Mar 03, 2003 3:15 pm

I've been having the same exact problem with my RR ixion. It just seems to me that RR (at least in my area) has degraded ever since it started getting more business (when i first got it, i was one of the first and it SCREAMED!) and now that they have more people on it, they needed to compensate by getting a little more bandwidth to spread around and they havent done that - i guess they are just betting on the fact that most people only want to download and load web pages fast, and unfortunately they are probably right. I'm the minority as a gamer.

------------------
(23:37) [X]kuntayjuss: using d3 fusion is like trying to hit a cow with south america

Ford Prefect · Post by **Ford Prefect** » Mon Mar 03, 2003 8:45 pm

Thanks for the advice guys (Well, I don't think I would classify Spidey's response as advice

) And yes I am on cable modem I will try out the test program and see if I can figure out what the h**l my rwin and rtu settings might be and where to find them.
I thought I was alone in having loss problems on cable but I quess it is not so uncommon after all.

------------------
Experience is something you get right after you needed it most.

jmurri · Post by **jmurri** » Wed Mar 05, 2003 1:53 am

Please don't consider this spam because I'm not really trying to sell software, just help out. I'm one of the two guys behind Ping Plotter and happened upon this post. We have a tutorial up on our site that would probably help some of you diagnose your connection problems. Again, I'm not trying to sell software here because if you don't find any use for PingPlotter then you don't buy it and just put up with the non-intrusive nag when the app first loads.

Anyway, the tutorial for PingPlotter is located here: http://www.pingplotter.com/tutorial/ and of particular interest for you folks would be the sections under /interpreting results.

We also have a support forum where you can ask questions about your graphs that may be off-topic (again I'm hoping that I'm not being off-topic on this board) here. While we'd prefer you actually registered PingPlotter, we'll still help you with your traceroute interpretations if you post a question there. We especially like questions that aren't covered in the FAQ so we can improve it. The link to the forums is here: http://pair.pingplotter.com/forums/

ixion · Post by **ixion** » Wed Mar 05, 2003 6:52 am

good info indeed! I will check this out once I get some time... would you perhaps have a Linux version??

Anyway, I finally got on some TCP/IP games last night and then onto PXO once it came back up... My pings were 400ms most of the time, dropping to 100-150 and rising to 500 at times.. it swas quite frustrating, but still a blast to finally play again... can ping plotter help me diagnose this? btw, once ping plotter diagnoses something, how do I go about fixing it? That's up to my broadband provider, is it not?

------------------
Planet Descent Staffer
http://www.planetdescent.com

Ford Prefect · Post by **Ford Prefect** » Thu Mar 06, 2003 10:39 pm

Interesting results. There is an un-named IP address that is the last hop before PXO.com that is losing packets and has erratic, often high ping times. Question is what to do about it. The tutorial seems to say I should send the info to my ISP but what do I ask them to do?
Very effective program by the way. Quite impressive.

------------------
Experience is something you get right after you needed it most.

zapped · Post by **zapped** » Fri Mar 07, 2003 2:42 pm

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR>Originally posted by Ford Prefect:
There is an un-named IP address that is the last hop before PXO.com that is losing packets and has erratic, often high ping times. Question is what to do about it.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

First off - ping & packet loss to pxo.com has nothing to do with your gameplay. Spikes & packetloss during gameplay occur between you and the game server, not between you & pxo.com.

Second - pxo.com is the web server. You connect to gt.parallaxonline.com, chat.parallaxonline.com, and ut.parallaxonline.com, not pxo.com.

Third - lost packets & no reverse-DNS information on any single hop in a traceroute might simply mean that the router on that hop doesn't respond to ICMP echo messages. ICMP echoes are what traceroute (and pingplotter) use.

Lastly - As I suggested earlier, try multiple pingplotter sessions to various machines on the 'net. When you get packetloss or ping spikes through any external hops that are common to all multiple destination IP addy's, then you have a hint of a problem either with your ISP or it's own upstream bandwidth provider. In either case all you can do is complain to the often-clueless tech support group at your ISP, or try a new ISP as I'm doing.

I know it's frustrating, but good luck with it!

------------------
Zapped
SYSTEM:Asus A7V333|Athlon XP 1700+|512MB DDR ram|GF4 Ti4200|WD 80GB+100GB 7200rpm HD|TB SantaCruz sound|Win 98SE

Ford Prefect · Post by **Ford Prefect** » Fri Mar 07, 2003 10:06 pm

Thanks Zapped I think I actually understood that. Except for that one flakey address my other attempts at tracing were all in the green but I will make a more serious attempt at finding a common weak link.

------------------
Experience is something you get right after you needed it most.

zapped · Post by **zapped** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 4:59 pm

Well ADSL & cable have been on simultaneously since last Wednesday (March 12). My oh my but the pings on DSL rock. Gameplay is soooo smooth & fluid. During primetime last Thursday evening, cable had pings 2.5x-4x higher to 6 different remote servers (mixture of websites, ftp sites, UT2003 game servers, and my work's central gateway) than DSL did at the same time. On Sunday morning, when everything on the 'net is basically quiet, cable still had 1.2x-2x worse pings than DSL.

Download-bandwidth-wise, cable still has DSL beat. I didn't test it at peak, but on Sunday morning I was getting about 1200kbps with DSL but slightly over 2000kbps with cable. Uploads were similar in speed. I'm paying for a DSL connect with 768+ download, 256 upload. Cable doesn't quote guaranteed min b/w of course.

The upshot for me is that there is NO packetloss with DSL and great pings, so 1) online gameplay r0x my s0x and 2) my Xwindows sessions thru the VPN tunnel to work are solid. Another week or so & I'll be calling Time-Weiner to fetch their cablemodem.

jmurri · Post by **jmurri** » Tue Mar 25, 2003 10:30 pm

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR>Originally posted by Ford Prefect:
 Interesting results. There is an un-named IP address that is the last hop before PXO.com that is losing packets and has erratic, often high ping times. Question is what to do about it. The tutorial seems to say I should send the info to my ISP but what do I ask them to do?
Very effective program by the way. Quite impressive.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

We don't have a Linux version yet, but we have ran PingPlotter under Wine. It runs relatively well, but you're better off sticking with the Wintel version until we get a native Linux version going. It's kind of jerky and we really were suprised it'd run at all. Interstingly, we really haven't had a lot of requests for a Linux version. There's a lot of cool tools to diagnose problems, but none that have the graphing capabilities that I've seen. For Linux I use Netpipe.

As for what to do once you can see you have a problem you're right, you can beat up on your ISP. Lots and lots of folks have sent off graphs asking them to fix problem routers, etc. That's actually how PingPlotter came about. The cool thing is you can show them exactly the problem router/whatever that they need to fix. We have a section in the tutorial on just how to handle situations with your ISP up at http://www.pingplotter.com/tutorial/Int ... hsISP.html

Feel free to ask a question on our msg board if one of the fine folks here can't answer it. The msg boards are at http://pair.pingplotter.com/forums/

Regards,
Jeff Murri
Nessoft, LLC

jmurri · Post by **jmurri** » Mon Jan 05, 2004 2:15 am

Just like for my earlier post from what seems like forever ago, please don't consider this spam. I know this isn't a "let's let the shareware vendors pimp their wares board", but those of you that use PingPlotter might be interested in the new beta we've got up at http://www.pingplotter.com/beta.html. A lot of ISPs have been blockimg ICMP because of the people that have too much time on their hands, so they write worms and such like Blaster. We've got a new beta version up that uses UDP to get around this problem. Some of you also may want to check out our new product MultiPing. It's specifically tailored for online gamers, daytraders and other folks that need to only see the best endpoint (monitoring as opposed to diagnosing and troubleshooting a connection) so they know where to connect. You can find out all the details at http://www.multiping.com. As PingPlotter is, it's sold via the Shareware model, which means you can run it through the wringer and see if it's the right tool for you.

Again, hopefully this isn't construed as spam, but purely informational. If you have any questions feel free to drop me a line at jeff@nessoft.com and I'll answer any question you may have.

Regards and best wishes,
Jeff Murri
Nessoft, LLC
jeff@nessoft.com

XeonJr · Post by **XeonJr** » Mon Jan 05, 2004 3:21 am

Ahh.. It's Cable... What did you expect?

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Mon Jan 05, 2004 1:15 pm

Hmmmm Jeff - how'd you remember this thread? Bringing old threads back to life is generally considered bad M-Kay!

However, because you're behind Ping Plotter (A tool I have used many times and like a lot!) you're excused - and I most definitely will check out the new Beta. I'll probably buy it this time too!

As to you coming here []D [] []\/[] []D [] []\[]' your warez - that's entirely OK - and I wish more people would do it! You should actually start a new thread - which is what I'll do for you right now...

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Mon Jan 05, 2004 1:18 pm

Wow... most of the time I would be foaming at the mouth at thread resurrection, but this is pretty awesome!

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Mon Jan 05, 2004 9:47 pm

Second I saw Spidey's post, I knew this had to be a resurrection.