Latency - gaming

[Cheeky_Ash]

Guys,

I'm tearing my hair out here - I've noticed a lot more latency gaming on my PS3 of late, about 4 weeks to be precise. Even when cabled directly to the modem (NAT 1). I play PES 2010 mostly.

I've phoned Virgin and they have checked the status of my Modem and UBR (Hosted out of Hayes) - I live in Chiswick. And apprantly it's fine and UBR is very under utilised.

Downloaded a Path Trace tool (very good) - and seems that it maybe the interconnect to Amsterdam causing the latency issues here, although I sometimes see small lag spikes around the local area (Brenford Transit and Hayes sites) but nothing major - I usually trace to www.konami.co.uk

Is anyone else having these problems?

Would it be
- contention in the network?
- Contention in the Interconnects - being oversubscribed?
- QoS settings?

If anyone can shed some light here or help it would be wonderful.

Many THanks,
Ashley

[Cheeky_Ash]

I guess no one has any information.

Oh well. I'm sure virgin will sort that problem out eventually, maybe its the interconnect to another ISP - probably oversubscribed.

[*sloman*]

go here: http://www.pingtest.net/

see what your ping is, it could be PS3 Network, the person hosting the game and even a lag switch, plenty of people use lag switches on XBL

[Sephiroth]

Pingtest.net is utterly useless. You get wildly different results from different servers that are totally outside any form of control. And then we get all sorts of wild deduction made based on the A-F grading and "jitter" numbers that simply can't be nailed to a cause.

IMO, the most informative state of the network report is PATHPING WWW.BBC.CO.UK which tells us what's going on at each hop. This needs to be correlated with modem stats and event log and a speed test (preferably not speedtest.net which is nearly as dodgy as pingtest.net.

If you do a series of pathpings, you'll see if there is congestion at the UBR.

[Cheeky_Ash]

Thanks and yes, I've used a path trace tool which provides a trace every 5 seconds exactly the same sort of thing path ping. Consistantly the culprint with www.konami.co.uk (I use that URL as it maybe linked to my games servers physically?) is a 200mS jump between the interconnect to Amsterdam I think on the 8th or 9th hop. Probably out from one of the telecity locations in London.

So I think it must be the interconnect being oversubscribed being the problem, but what can we do as customers to find this out and force virgin to take action as it's poor service.

[pabscars]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Pingtest.net is utterly useless. You get wildly different results from different servers that are totally outside any form of control. And then we get all sorts of wild deduction made based on the A-F grading and "jitter" numbers that simply can't be nailed to a cause.

IMO, the most informative state of the network report is PATHPING WWW.BBC.CO.UK which tells us what's going on at each hop. This needs to be correlated with modem stats and event log and a speed test (preferably not speedtest.net which is nearly as dodgy as pingtest.net.

If you do a series of pathpings, you'll see if there is congestion at the UBR.

Apologies to the op for butting in, only Ive tried a few times in vein to run a pathping to www.bbc.co.uk and all that happens is it comes strait back with

0 No Resources ?????

Obviously I must be missing something, no idea what though

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Cheeky_Ash

Thanks and yes, I've used a path trace tool which provides a trace every 5 seconds exactly the same sort of thing path ping. Consistantly the culprint with www.konami.co.uk (I use that URL as it maybe linked to my games servers physically?) is a 200mS jump between the interconnect to Amsterdam I think on the 8th or 9th hop. Probably out from one of the telecity locations in London.

So I think it must be the interconnect being oversubscribed being the problem, but what can we do as customers to find this out and force virgin to take action as it's poor service.

A copy/paste of the traceroute would be useful - I ping that site high via my DSL due to it being in Japan.

7 16 ms 17 ms 17 ms ae-2.r23.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.4.133]
8 269 ms 277 ms 278 ms as-4.r20.osakjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.5.35]
9 311 ms 286 ms 272 ms ae-4.r20.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.4.209]
10 310 ms 311 ms 310 ms xe-1-3.a16.tokyjp01.jp.ra.gin.ntt.net [61.213.169.178]
11 277 ms 279 ms 279 ms ge-8-14.a16.tokyjp01.jp.ra.gin.ntt.net [61.213.160.182]
12 450 ms 403 ms 408 ms 211.132.2.118
13 283 ms 285 ms 285 ms 219.99.134.194
14 273 ms 273 ms 277 ms 219.99.134.237
15 275 ms 280 ms 277 ms 211.132.7.225

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by pabscars

Apologies to the op for butting in, only Ive tried a few times in vein to run a pathping to www.bbc.co.uk and all that happens is it comes strait back with

0 No Resources ?????

Obviously I must be missing something, no idea what though

Ah - I think that's because you need to run the command window as Administrator.

[pabscars]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Ah - I think that's because you need to run the command window as Administrator.

Thanks Sephiroth, will try that tonight

[Ignitionnet]

I thought I'd mention that I notice more jitter on my VM 50M service than on my O2 16/2 service.

From http://myvoipspeed.visualware.com/ - London server:

VM:

VoIP test statistics
--------------------
Jitter: you --> server: 20.9 ms
Jitter: server --> you: 18.1 ms
Packet loss: you --> server: 0.0 %
Packet loss: server --> you: 0.6 %
Packet discards: 2.8 %
Packets out of order: 0.0 %
Estimated MOS score: 3.6


O2:

VoIP test statistics
--------------------
Jitter: you --> server: 3.1 ms
Jitter: server --> you: 10.6 ms
Packet loss: you --> server: 0.0 %
Packet loss: server --> you: 0.0 %
Packet discards: 0.6 %
Packets out of order: 0.0 %
Estimated MOS score: 3.9

[RainmakerRaw]

Seems OK on my 50 meg. London server again.

VoIP test statistics
--------------------
Jitter: you --> server: 3.6 ms
Jitter: server --> you: 5.2 ms
Packet loss: you --> server: 0.0 %
Packet loss: server --> you: 0.0 %
Packet discards: 0.0 %
Packets out of order: 0.0 %
Estimated MOS score: 4.0

[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Pingtest.net is utterly useless. You get wildly different results from different servers that are totally outside any form of control. And then we get all sorts of wild deduction made based on the A-F grading and "jitter" numbers that simply can't be nailed to a cause.

IMO, the most informative state of the network report is PATHPING WWW.BBC.CO.UK which tells us what's going on at each hop. This needs to be correlated with modem stats and event log and a speed test (preferably not speedtest.net which is nearly as dodgy as pingtest.net.

If you do a series of pathpings, you'll see if there is congestion at the UBR.

if im not mistaken pathping shows packetloss but not jitter, I find it an annoying app to use because of this since jitter is very important.

tracert's ,mtr and winmtr are great at showing how weak VM cable services are. even simply pinging an ip will do it.

I have spent an hour or so reading these forums and the official VM community forums and noticed a common factor.

That factor been people with problems have posted traceroutes showing 'jitter' jitter is typically caused by congestion of some sort or at least high utilisation, repeatedly the traceroutes are declared fine and showing no problems as if its considered a normal part of service to have jitter.

My thoery seems proven because the people who are lucky enough to get upgrades then find their service is still congested 'after' the upgrade which can only mean the utilisation must have been horiffic post upgrade.

I would love to know what the threshold's are on UBR's that VM consider to be high utilisation.

VM are massively overselling and it scares me they trialling 10mbit upload, 100mbit download etc. They need to either do some major upgrade work around the country or reduce the speeds they selling because they heading for the product not fit for purpose path.

[pabscars]

Would Jitter make itself apparent in FPS games?, if so how?

I,m guessing the answer is yes,

I,m hoping to compile a little video footage and have a friend post it on youtube for me, he was explaining how he and everyone else views me from there perspective whilst playing MW2.

My fellow gamers say its like watching me teleport 6 feet at a time

Last night for them was very frustrating in the respect that I was literally bouncing round the screen making it very difficult for them to shoot accurately at me.

The only thing I was seeing was the usual lag spikes every few seconds or so, or when I pull the trigger and from my perspective the game played pretty smooth.

[Chrysalis]

it would yes, however I expect light jitter (sub 5ms) you could get away with.

if you get one packet sent at 10ms and then the next at 50ms and the one after at 20ms, that will cause you to move unpredictably.

for me using ssh its a nightmare as that is also something very sensitive to jitter as well as packet loss.

[ianm2k4]

The lag may not be the connection. Some games are hosted on other PS3's and the lag could be due to their upload speed and ping times to the rest of the players.

Unfortunately you cannot do a ping or traceroute to the other players (unknown IPs and the PS never returns a ping).

I see this mainly on Modern Warfare 2 even though most of the players seem to have a 'descent' signal strength