Really bizarre networking issue involving in-game latency - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 04, 2018, 10:16:34 am
content: My other half plays a lot of games. He has been complaining of lag, particularly with Minecraft where "actions" sometimes take up to 10 seconds after being clicked on. Other times the games run perfectly fine.- There is no pattern to times/dates- This happens on various games and connecting to different Minecraft servers- From what I can see, nothing is being blocked at the firewall- It happens regardless if he uses Ethernet or the wireless card in his desktop machine- QoS is switched off on the network- Speedtest shows that the internet is running perfectly normally within a browser, with expected ping times even during the in-game slowness- There no correlating increase to latency at the router out to the internet- As expected, his LAN connection auto-negotiates a Gigabit connection to the switch with no erroneous packets- His machine is certainly powerful enough and isn't starved of CPU resources or RAM- We sustain an internet connection speed of 27/10 Mbps down/up 24/7.I honestly don't know what the issue could be?!

author: Zucca
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 04, 2018, 10:30:41 am
content: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer- CPU Load graph from ? Just to be sure, specs on paper doesn't mean nothing sometime.- Have you tried to play on a different PC?Could be the same issue in different Minecraft servers (overload)...

author: stj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 04, 2018, 10:36:35 am
content: most diagnostics wont help here,you need to test UDP speed and reliability.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 04, 2018, 10:27:21 pm
content: Thanks for your suggestions guys.Quote from: zucca on September 04, 2018, 10:30:41 amIt's definitely not due to lack of system resources, I've checked all that already.I don't really have another suitable machine to test on, but so far in my testing, I don't think it's the machine itself (I haven't ruled out something funky with the Windows installation yet).Quote from: zucca on September 04, 2018, 10:30:41 amI thought that too, but it's happening far too often at irregular intervals, for varying lengths of time. I still haven't completely 100% ruled it out but it appears users on the same server at the same time aren't having the same issues. I think if it were an issue with the server not keeping up, it would effect many users at once.Quote from: stj on September 04, 2018, 10:36:35 amGood point and something I haven't fully looked into yet. I'll download iPerf and do some testing over the weekend.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 05, 2018, 03:34:15 am
content: You mention using a Gigabit switch. Is your WAN connection saturated by other traffic?If your WAN connection is saturated and the switch has to choose which traffic to forward, then there may be problems because switches are generally not good at this sort of thing. In theory this is a solved problem with the switch implementing flow control but I am dubious.If this is the problem, then the solution is to add traffic shaping at the WAN connection.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 05, 2018, 03:36:26 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on September 05, 2018, 03:34:15 amI don't think it's an issue with the WAN side being saturated. The problem occurs even when there is no other significant activity on the internet connection.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 05, 2018, 11:34:42 am
content: Wireshark it.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 05, 2018, 11:43:30 am
content: Quote from: amyk on September 05, 2018, 11:34:42 amLeft or right shark? :p

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 05, 2018, 12:42:52 pm
content: Does your cable modem have a Intel Puma chipset, they are known for irregular latency issues. Try a modem with Broadcom chipset. You can google Puma 6 7 problem, there is also a list of modems with that chipset, you can check if your modem is on the list.