Help with lag testing

[Chongo]

Bear in mind my relative ignorance to technical computer things.

I was getting pretty impressive lag spikes today on both central and east.  They lasted around 10-30+ seconds.  I've spoken to two others in the past two days that have experienced the same thing.

My modem wasn't doing any strange blinking things.

My internet connection wasn't impaired at all.  I did some connection speed tests and some ping tests and they all looked normal for a cable modem.  I did a trace test to east.layonara.com and nothing was wrong there.  Bear in mind I was just trying whatever tests I could find on google... I have little idea as to what they prove.

Direct connecting outside of gamespy didn't yield any improvement.

What I'm wondering is how and what I should be testing to see what is causing this, especially in the case of my ISP failing in some way.  Outside of NWN everything seems to be functioning fine.  That and determining what I can be doing possibly to alleviate it.

This is not a chronic problem, I was just wondering how to narrow down the cause.

[Leanthar]

Do a ping -t east.layonara.com and let it run for about 10 minutes. Watch for dropped timeouts or longer than average transfer times. Post the results here in a .txt file.

Also do a tracert east.layonara.com a few times (over the hour or two) and post the results here in a .txt file.

[Chongo]

The ping pretty much had this:

Reply from 69.80.198.70: bytes=32 time=165ms TTL=114
Reply from 69.80.198.70: bytes=32 time=162ms TTL=114

Plus or minus a few ms on the time per over the 15 minutes I let it run.

The trace:

Tracing route to east.layonara.com [69.80.198.70]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     7 ms     8 ms    21 ms  10.253.36.1
  2     6 ms     7 ms     7 ms  host-69-144-94-210.cra-co.client.bresnan.net [69
.144.94.210]
  3    37 ms    35 ms    36 ms  host-69-144-94-5.cra-co.client.bresnan.net [69.1
44.94.5]
  4    36 ms    36 ms    39 ms  host-69-144-94-178.cra-co.client.bresnan.net [69
.144.94.178]
  5    52 ms    52 ms    52 ms  12.124.170.113
  6    54 ms    52 ms    52 ms  12.123.44.10
  7    53 ms    51 ms    51 ms  tbr2-p012501.st6wa.ip.att.net [12.122.5.161]
  8    51 ms    55 ms    54 ms  12.127.6.61
  9    54 ms    52 ms    50 ms  192.205.33.122
 10    53 ms    52 ms    53 ms  0.so-7-3-0.XL2.SEA1.ALTER.NET [152.63.105.22]
 11    75 ms    91 ms    80 ms  0.so-0-1-0.XL2.SFO4.ALTER.NET [152.63.50.162]
 12    76 ms    75 ms    74 ms  POS7-0.GW3.SFO4.ALTER.NET [152.63.51.125]
 13   120 ms   118 ms   118 ms  netoptex-gw.customer.alter.net [157.130.198.218]

 14   114 ms   111 ms   116 ms  core-02.ge-6-14.sfo1.gni.com [64.127.96.42]
 15   119 ms   122 ms   120 ms  core-02.ge-6-4.sjc1.gni.com [64.127.97.89]
 16   133 ms   133 ms   130 ms  69.80.198.70

With a slight plus or minus here and there per.

[Leanthar]

Looks pretty darn good all the way there and back.

[Chongo]

Yeah, next time it starts happening I'll run tests to see what's up.  I got back on after posting those up and had no problems.  I know Daerin was having similar problems about 3 hours ago, Linda was having problems the same time I was, and Angela was having problems last night.  Seems odd for so many different ISPs to be having the same sort of huge lag spikes.

I'll test it out next time it's happening.  Thanks for helping out L... probably just a bum connection at that time.

[Leanthar]

Blackguy was having problems yesterday and on IRC we showed him where the problem was. It was probably the same spot.

As for odd..not really if something was going on the internet (like a router was having problems out that was on a major route).

[lonnarin]

A couple of party members were noticing that today as well.  I find that most of the spikes that caused the freezing up and occasional crashes are mostly from login scripts.  I'm sure my collection of gem dusts isn't helping the matter, so I'll downsize those quite a bit.  Inventory management and timing portal hops to at least 30 seconds between jumps helps a good deal.  Whenever a whole group leaps from server to server, that's usually when the 5 second spikes act up.  Dumping 3-4 animal meats on the ground for every skin doesn't help much either

Still, when I first came here there were those NPC Vendors in the hall... folks these days don't know lag spikes like 150 differently populated merchant inventories at once every time somebody browsed for the best price.

You've probably already done this, but also check if your computer or any others on your router are running any spyware/filesharing programs.  One day I was crashing out about every 2-3 area transitions and checked my roommate's computer to find like 400k worth uploading and downloading EACH.  went from around 1600 ping down to 92ish.

[Leanthar]

All good points Lonn. A lot of items in inventory will indeed cause 10-30 second lag spikes when people are logging in to the server. That is why we ask for people to keep their inventory under control.

[Chongo]

The reason I said odd was because the people having problems around the same time were in Denmark, Germany, and the US.  I don't know how routers work though, so maybe that makes sense.

What I was working at with this is how to figure out where the problem is.  How exactly did you determine where the problem was?   Tracing?

Again, I plead total ignorance.    

[Talan Va'lash]

Chongo - 10/4/2006  9:13 PM

The reason I said odd was because the people having problems around the same time were in Denmark, Germany, and the US.  I don't know how routers work though, so maybe that makes sense.

What I was working at with this is how to figure out where the problem is.  How exactly did you determine where the problem was?   Tracing?

Again, I plead total ignorance.    

Well, everyone's going to the same place (san francisco) so its likely that there are a few larger routers that most/all people on the servers are going through one or two hops before they get to the layo servers themselves. If one of the larger bay area routers dies, more traffic is forced onto the other regional routers.

Sometimes a trace is real usefull if you see one point where it goes from like 30 ms to 500 over one of the hops. Though I'm not entirely sure what you'd do about it then.. other than go, "Ayep, thats why its being laggy." heh. Not sure how to control what routers you hop through.

[Doc-Holiday]

Lag is what makes me fear the day we go DNC... "Direct Neural Connection"...

I'd hate to have my brain time out....




any more than it already does...

[Hellblazer]

Hehehehe lmao

[lonnarin]

Psychotropic worms and viruses don't sound too good either.  Ever heard of Black Ice programs from Shadowrun?  On moment you're hacking into a corporate/govt server downloading their dirty laundry, the next you suddenly start going into seizures and drop dead from the feedback loop.

[fighting_cheese]

Whatever he said *raises an eyebrow*

[Blackguy]

I began to have the same problems, last night on the hunt quest. Had alot of disconnects. and Ive never had disconnects before. It almost feels as if my connection dies for 10-20 seconds. I really are stumbed, but it seems to go the right way atleast.