Trying to diagnose lag in gaming

I'm trying to use pingtest.net or megapath to see my packet loss, but the packet loss portion always fails. It tells me it is either my java version or my firewall. I have the latest java, disabled windows firewall, disabled antivirus, set java to medium which is the lowest security setting, tried different browsers, but still can't get a packet loss reading. I have AT&T U-verse with a Motorola NVG510 with known DNS issues and occasionally I would have to restart the router to get back internet, or the internet goes unresponsive for a few seconds to a few minutes every few days. The internet isn't as bad as it sounds, but it isn't super reliable when you need a quick connection, although it still gets full download speed and ping times are under 40ms. But I am interested in the packet loss number and I still can't get it to work. Would the NVG510 firewall be preventing me from running the tes properly?

I've been playing Dark Souls 2, which is notorious for the bad lag. I don't know how anyone can play this game lag free, but apparently many do. The lag has been getting worse and worse and I don't know if its my less than ideal connection or if its just far more frequent connections with international players, which doesn't explain why I always get the short end of the stick with lag. It's more annoying since I only lag against certain people during PvP, while many others will be perfectly fine and lag-free. It just depends on who I get connected with. With the ones that lag, frequently they will move perfectly smoothly and don't exhibit any downstream loss like freezing in one place, so I can see what they are doing but my character's coordinates are completely screwed and they are killing me 50 feet away without any confused movements on their part so it seems they see my location and movements perfectly fine but my view of them is desynched but still smooth and fluid. I also get the ones that jerk around a lot, but that makes more sense to me since the other guy probably sees me jerking around as well.

silverwolf0 said:

I'm trying to use pingtest.net or megapath to see my packet loss, but the packet loss portion always fails. It tells me it is either my java version or my firewall. I have the latest java, disabled windows firewall, disabled antivirus, set java to medium which is the lowest security setting, tried different browsers, but still can't get a packet loss reading. I have AT&T U-verse with a Motorola NVG510 with known DNS issues and occasionally I would have to restart the router to get back internet, or the internet goes unresponsive for a few seconds to a few minutes every few days. The internet isn't as bad as it sounds, but it isn't super reliable when you need a quick connection, although it still gets full download speed and ping times are under 40ms. But I am interested in the packet loss number and I still can't get it to work. Would the NVG510 firewall be preventing me from running the tes properly?

I've been playing Dark Souls 2, which is notorious for the bad lag. I don't know how anyone can play this game lag free, but apparently many do. The lag has been getting worse and worse and I don't know if its my less than ideal connection or if its just far more frequent connections with international players, which doesn't explain why I always get the short end of the stick with lag. It's more annoying since I only lag against certain people during PvP, while many others will be perfectly fine and lag-free. It just depends on who I get connected with. With the ones that lag, frequently they will move perfectly smoothly and don't exhibit any downstream loss like freezing in one place, so I can see what they are doing but my character's coordinates are completely screwed and they are killing me 50 feet away without any confused movements on their part so it seems they see my location and movements perfectly fine but my view of them is desynched but still smooth and fluid. I also get the ones that jerk around a lot, but that makes more sense to me since the other guy probably sees me jerking around as well.

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Have you tried just pinging an external server from the command line to check for packet loss? Google's DNS servers respond to pings (8.8.8.8). If that is fine, then try to find the IP address of the server that you are experiencing lag on and see if there are any dropped packets there.

I don't know much about Dark Souls 2, but in my experience with newer games, the latency issues are usually located in the datacenters. A lot of game publishers (and even small devs) are making deals with server hosting companies to give a small number of them exclusive rights over dedicated servers. This results in the hosting providers massively overselling their gear. In the servers that we experienced latency issues on, it turned out that the storage array that our VMs were on was being over taxed. Paying more to have our VMs moved to a server in Canada fixed that.

Best way to figure out where your problem is, is to remove as many variables as possible. Can you plug a PC directly to the modem/router for a direct Internet connection? If you do that and have the same issues, then it's upstream from the PC.

Could also try putting that modem/router into bridge mode and use your own router. No idea how good that Motorola works, but I've found the Verizon FiOS modem/routers (Actiontec) are best when they're in bridge mode and I'm using my own router.

Hey silverwolf0 just sent you a PM to a testing site (I don't know if they want their testing app widely known on the internet) use anything in the company name box, it doesn't matter.

Beyond that, I've done a bit of research on uverse ( because I'm moving in a month to an ATT controlled area, and loosing my FiOS ) and what I found that if you want the best that you can get out of uverse you cant use the NVG510, unless you hack it. If you hack it and use phone through it, you will lose your phone service. For me that wasn't an option. ATT offers another modem, model NVG589, get that, set it to do DMZ+ mode and get your own high quality router. (personally I currently use a modified cisco pix515e, and a blackhawk r7000 w/ ddwrt for my wifi)



Edit: You might try hacking your modem first to see if bridge mode even helps at all, cheaper than going through all the above expense and find out it was all for nothing. http://earlz.net/view/2012/06/07/0026/rooting-the-nvg510-from-the-webui

Simple and basic testing is all that is needed.
Run the following pings while gaming, preferably on second monitor.

• Ping local device inside network (switch or another PC)
• Ping the gateway device (your gateway/DHCP server)
• Ping your ISP's gateway
• Ping a Google DNS
• Ping the game server if you can

Now whatch and see what drops or blows.

• If anything inside network gets messy, your issues is yours.
• If the local network is sweet but blows to your ISP's gateway then you have contention/congestion issues.
• If all is sweet but the game server get shitty, then it is the retarded game server host, rip into them or find a better game.

Come back with results.



P.S - Bridging a cable modem is the magic if you can, it will take a lot of variables out and allow the control you should have on the network. Not all can though.

i have similar problems with PS3 console playing GTA 5 online which is a very complex game and pushes the consoles outdated hardware to the edge. It doesnt really run the game properly when theres lots of action and things quit spawning or the session gets glitched but it worked much better from last october up till memorial day when the lag issues started happening, some of the errors have been off and on the whole time and in the 3 previous patches i froze the console completely and most packet loss tests i tried never work either and i really have never figured out why. pathping and a few other obscureish website tests ive tried have completed with very low or none lost. ive done everything to troubleshoot that i can and my isp says my connection is fine, and it certainly seems to be from every test ive done other than those packet loss tests failing to work, its a 30Mbps up/down fiber connection and i dont have much slowness anywhere else, sometime when clicking a link in a browser it will hang for a second or 3 and it doesnt matter which browser i use, but it happens rarely and not as severe as what im seeing in game. i can stream HD video with no issues.

The network engineer at my isp pretty much told me that pings and speed tests and such are not really a good tool for testing such things as they arent connecting to the same places or sending the same packet protocols as the game data that has problems, which makes sense, but i still think they can offer a rough guide of whether or not there is something odd happening. I had weird traceroute results that led me to this point, but they turned out to be inconclusive nothingness and 100% meaningless and inaccurate for anything apparently, lol

There are lots of cheaters/modders in the game im playing and while it seems worse with certain people for sure part of my problems are bad code and other peoples bad connections cause its a peer to peer game instead of peer to server, where the guy with the slow connection loses in peer to server its been my experience that he has the advantage over me in peer to peer. Im pretty sure some of them are maxing out their connections using torrents or lag switches or whatever to do this on purpose and my game definitely runs better when i avoid known cheaters and the issues i have then might be just bad game code memory leak or something cause restarting the console seems to fix it for a short time. i dont understand how not everyone has that problem though if it is such a thing, and i have two consoles which ive formatted and even tried SSD drives in with no change in results, other than massive decrease in loading time with the SSD.

I have a routerboard with mirror port and use wireshark to monitor my traffic but its very complex and ive been learning but ive got no background in networking and my previous experience has only been setting up my own home network which is quite simple and doesnt take a rocket scientist. Ive been unable to discern any issues using wireshark but i barely know what im looking at so i may have missed something, couple of suspected ones turned out to be nothing, got some captures for a network engineer to look at when i get some free time from work to set up appointment for him to come over and check it out but at this point im thinking its mostly cheaters, some game code and some other people with bad connections. hopefully its fixed and runs better on the PC version dropping early next year, cause consoles are shite for PVP combat gaming compared to my PC. GTA and blueray are the only things i do with my ps3, lol

I should also note that ive used different DNS servers but it didnt really seem to change much if at all, but if you know yours are bad you can change them and fix that. The ones my isp uses had an issue with one of them for a while and i fixed it by using 8.8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 which are google public DNS servers and 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 which i got off some PSN forum and not sure what they are. but if i remembered and typed the ip correctly they did work great. ive since switched back to my isp used ones as they corrected the problem and have never had any previously, but from what i know or could tell its doesnt matter which of them i use, theres no discernible change for me.

good luck!