New to server, connection issues

[Kaching]

Hey all I just started out on this server with a few friends. A few years ago we were on uoforever and back in the day Catskills. We're in Idaho all typically 10+ Mbps speed through DSL and having pretty bad lag issues. I noticed some older threads and mention of moving the server etc etc, but am just curioius if anyone has any suggestions? I tried lowerping w/ multiple TX/CA servers which I found suggestions for and all are equally as bad. Am I pretty much out of luck?

 

[bane]

I am in California on a cable connection (15Mbps) and my ping is pretty consistently in the 40-75ms range with the occasional spike. If you are having a large amount of lag from Idaho (server is in TX I believe) there may be other factors at play (Deep packet inspection on router, bad router, ISP, ..etc.). The period of really high lag that you were seeing mentioned in the forums were from the Ice Storms that hit TX.

 

[Kaching]

I tried even from my work with about a 50mbps connection, same thing. Additionally as mentioned, my friends are running into same issue. It's definitely not localized hardware... It could be something I guess in the general area infrastructure... Kinda disappointed.

 

[bane]

I tried even from my work with about a 50mbps connection, same thing. Additionally as mentioned, my friends are running into same issue. It's definitely not localized hardware... It could be something I guess in the general area infrastructure... Kinda disappointed.

Bummer. Yeah from your description it could be some routing weirdness sending you on a much longer path then you should be. You might want to try doing a trace route to determine the path and latency at each hop.

For UO and most games bandwidth isn't really a factor these days it is pretty much all latency driven. So technology that your connection is delivered through is much more important. Typically Fiber > Cable > DSL (over simplification as you can have a mixed topology with FTTH and FTTN also you can have network effects that can impact latency)

One other thing you could try, this is heavily dependent on your ISP, is if your router supports QoS tagging to mark the packets for UO with a really high priority value for QoS. If your ISP respects the QoS values that you set then this could improve things. Some ISPs don't respect QoS values set by client connections (more common on consumer grade connections). If the ISP ignores your QoS tagging or overwrites it with their own values then this will do nothing.

Here is QoS reference http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/swi...4_0/qos/configuration/guide/qos_6dscp_val.pdf

Even consumer grade hardware is capable of QoS if you can flash it to a custom firmware (DD-WRT or Tomato)

Here is the link to DD-WRT (my favorite router firmware): http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index

If you want feel free to send me your trace route in a PM or post here and I will try to help. Holidays are upon us so might be busy.

 

[Kaching]

1 7 ms 14 ms 3 ms 192.168.0.1
2 30 ms 30 ms 28 ms boid-dsl-gw15.boid.qwest.net [184.99.64.15]
3 85 ms 27 ms 27 ms boid-agw1.inet.qwest.net [184.99.65.113]
4 40 ms 40 ms 40 ms sea-brdr-02.inet.qwest.net [67.14.41.18]
5 39 ms 39 ms 41 ms 63.146.27.70
6 83 ms 82 ms 82 ms TenGigE0-6-2-0.GW4.DFW13.ALTER.NET [152.63.101.1
7]
7 80 ms 80 ms 81 ms internapGIGE1-gw.customer.alter.net [65.208.15.2
30]
8 88 ms 81 ms 80 ms border2.te3-1-bbnet1.dal006.pnap.net [216.52.191
.3]
9 81 ms 82 ms 82 ms ionity-4.border2.dal006.pnap.net [63.251.44.14]

10 84 ms 83 ms 83 ms 199.231.224.41
11 81 ms 80 ms 81 ms 192.65.242.98

So for testing purposes I just downloaded a client to access a free UO server in spain. No lag really there...