Online gaming very laggy, need help.

[Mallig]

Where to begin? Well, I use Comcast@Home and have a Toshiba PCX1100U cable modem. I am fairly happy with surfing the web, downloading files, and sending, receiving emails with large attachments. I went to PC Pit Stop and ran their Download/Upload Speed Test and got the following from results:

Download
1. 1891Kbps
2. 1630Kpbs
3. 1505Kbps

Upload (I ran the tests a few more times):
1. 299 Kbps 6. 237 Kbps
2. 215 Kbps 7. 44 Kbps
3. 418 Kbps 8. 368 Kbps
4. 22 Kbps 9. 146 Kbps
5. 64 Kbps 10. 320 Kbps

The problem is this. When I try and play Unreal Tournament (or any of my online games, Quake III, Tribes 2, etc...), I can typically find several servers with under 150 ping times. When I connect to them, my pings are anywhere from 250-500, with spikes up into the 1,000 and higher levels.

Looking at the upload times above, it seems pretty sporatic, but if you average them you get 213.3 Kbps which doesn't seem too bad I guess. Is there a program that check bandwidth by mimicing gameplay (i.e. sends and receives various packet sizes and displays latency problems? That may help me pinpoint a problem. One other thought...could my problems be the Code Red Virus? It does seem like my cable modems Data light blinks a lot more rapidly than it used to.

I used to be able to play online games with no problems so I can rule out the game settings. And if I complain to ComCast as soon as you mention games they immediately tell you it's not them.

I ran the TCP/IP analyzer at Speed Guide.Net and got the following:
--------------------------------------------------------
TCP options string = 020405b40103030001010402

MTU = 1500
MTU is fully optimized for broadband.

MSS = 1460
Maximum useful data in each packet = 1460, which is equal to MSS.

Default Receive Window (RWIN) = 64240
RWIN Scaling (RFC1323) = 0 bits
Unscaled Receive Window = 64240
RWIN is a multiple of MSS
Other values for RWIN that might work well with your current MTU/MSS:
513920 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 8)
256960 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 4)
128480 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 2)

bandwidth * delay product:
Your RcvWindow limits you to: 2569.6 kbps (321.2 KBytes/s) @ 200ms
Your RcvWindow limits you to: 1027.84 kbps (128.48 KBytes/s) @ 500ms

MTU Discovery (RFC1191) = ON

Time to live left = 54 hops
TTL value is ok.

Timestamps (RFC1323) = OFF

Selective Acknowledgements (RFC2018) = ON

IP type of service field (RFC1349)= 00000000
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Joe]

With a lot of games like that you are pinging multiple servers at once... That is probably why your 150 ping server ended up being a 250ms server..

Try using more aggresive filter settings or limit how many servers are pinged if possible...

or if you can refresh single servers do that to get a more accurate ping.

[eroman19]

all major cable companies (ie rr, @home) were complete garbage the whole month of august (still pretty nasty here) supposedly cause of the 'code red' bs. and yea, thats definately why your activitiy lights a blinking all the time. using some kind of packet sniffing tool, u can see lights flash in sync with each random 'arp request' spammed at u by an infected user (or an infected user's gateway server) near or on your network im still averaging like 80 'arp requests' per minute on my roadrunner cable.....not really sure how many but a certain amount of 'arp requests' are normal.

last week tho, i had something similar problem u described.
was pinging a solid 80ms in dos (which is too high but at least it seemed stable and more playable for q3 compared to my usual 50ms.......200ms......35ms.......150ms that i've had all month), however, my ping would sky rocket upwards of 500-999 connecting to any server.
a few phone calls to rr's admin, 2 home tech visits, and several help desk phone calls later it was finally fixed......horray, now its back to horriblly inconsistant pings until 2am instead of just crap all the time =(
anyhow, ill bet u have a doccsis modem that creates it's own ip address (something like 10.74.x.x maybe) and thats where ur latency begins. i have an sb4100 surfboard.

oh yea, to answer ur other question.....'Is there a program that check bandwidth by mimicing gameplay...'

u could always just ping with more data like 'ping san.rr.com -l
16000 =)

[YeOldeStonecat]

Depending on where you live, if you're in New England....@home switched one of their main pipes to the internet. A LOT of my clan and gaming friends are stuck with only @home, and about a month ago, they couldn't play on our public gaming server which runs UT and Quake3. Their pings were all of a sudden in the 500's, when they're used to being in the 60's - 80's. Had a buddy do a tracert.....and we found a new path, all of a sudden sprintnet was being used instead of the usual unet. Now, coming from Connecticut, the tracert heads on down into New York, into New Jersey, and you'll see a particular gateway in New Jersey where your ping will skyrocket, then come back into Connecticut, and into Hartford where our gaming server is co-located. A lot of people on our server, when they complain what happened cuz their pings sucks now....I ask what they have for an ISP....and the answer is always @home. I tell them to try the tracert to our server....and yup...sprintnet is now in the picture.

Upload speeds, download speeds, MTU, RWIN, they really don't affect the pings of a good clean Windows install....the key factor to online gaming and ping is the amount of hops you make to your target....and how busy those hops are.

[Xiccarph]

What some others said here is an unfortunate fact...much of the high ping and deathly lag is not due to your PC configurations and connection, but what your signal has to pass thru to get to the game server. I also am a UT and U "frag freak", and play both thru a direct connection to the backbone at my university as well as thru DSL at home. I played via a 56k modem at home prior to DSL. Many factors give me hi pings and lag on all these connections at various times.

Even on the university connection, I suffer lag with some U and UT servers, this is mostly due to how busy the net or the university sytem is, or the route used from my PC to the game server, but some of it may also be due to the game server's configuration. You may get a good ping and test speed, but if the server has too little memory, and insufficient connection to the net, or something else that bogs it down when 5 or 15 players are on it, little you do to your system will make a difference. A lot of it boils down to where the server is too. One of my favs are the nguk servers in the UK, I suffer varying degrees of lag regardless what connection I'm on, and my pings are always higher than most other players...who usually are in Europe. The 1/4 to 1/2 second delay from the time I fire a weapon till it actually shoots is a big disadvantage when the 40, 60 or 80 pinging target moves 5 or 10 "game feet" to the right or left by the time my shot goes where they just were according to the crosshairs.
If you have tweaked your UT and other games, and tweaked your connection, learn to "lead" your shots (not an easy task in a close quarter deathmatch, lol), because you may often find lag exists to some extent at any time from any game server your connecting to, regardless of your connection method to the net. Lets hope all servers eventually install ZeroPing to help even out the playing field more.

[Mallig]

First off, thanks for all the speedy reply's.

As far as the suggestion by Ping to "try using more aggresive filter settings or limit how many servers are pinged if possible... or if you can refresh single servers do that to get a more accurate ping." I do filter the servers I connect to somewhat, and often times I can hop on to a server that pings well below 50ms (even after I re-ping it a few times). Unfortunately, once I connect, my pings times vary all over the place. This also makes it hard to even 'lead' targets as mentioned by Xiccarph because the ping times aren't stable...so how far I need to lead a guy constantly varies. Not to say I don't try (oh lord how I try! anything to get my online gaming fix!) but it's very frustrating/borderline impossible to play online these days.

It sounds like eroman19 experienced something very similar to what I am going through now. I am interested in knowing what you told the support folks, and what, if anything, they did to help your connection. My modem is DOCCIS compliant, but my IP address is always the same. Was tier 2 support able to see any problems from their tests? What did they do about it?

Oh how I long for my sub 100 ping times!