More info on the AT&T lag issue.

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whoisthisis
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More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by whoisthisis » Sat Oct 13, 2018 1:04 am

I randomly get some fairly bad crippling lag. But only about 5 to 10% of the time. I figured it was just the beamdog NWN EE being silly.
But I guess not. On a hunch I tried a ping test with no time out.

Someone should get the server host who hosts your server to look into this. Its possibly a misconfigured item on their network (or between theirs and AT&T) causing this.

Image

It comes in really odd spurts.

Dumb question, Why the UK host? With apologies to the UKers on here, some of the worst issues I have had with getting to sites have been with UK based internet providers.

whoisthisis
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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by whoisthisis » Sat Oct 13, 2018 1:09 am

The thing I noticed, that even on comcast. There are "spikes" they are just not as bad.
It will be in the 178ms range. And then it will randomly jump to 150 to 170ms.

Even still the time to response, is pretty bad. If I ping something like the BBC.co.uk I get pings in the 30ms range.

Something is wrong, and its something your game host should look at. I saw the thread for what you guys pay, and you deserve better service then this.

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Liareth
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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by Liareth » Sat Oct 13, 2018 1:23 am

This is a problem that you will need to sort out with your ISP. More information here on the latter pages, and you can also search the forums for 'ISP' or 'lag' or 'AT&T' to get some hits: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=17401

We're hosted by OVH because they offer the best hardware for hosting NWN servers and provide excellent DDOS protection.

whoisthisis
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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by whoisthisis » Sat Oct 13, 2018 1:35 am

The problem isnt with OWH or my I. Its somewhere in the many hops between them.

I have a ticket in with AT&T, but I think you will have more luck getting OWH to look into this. One of the many hops between AT&T and OWH is dropping packets BAD.

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Liareth
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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by Liareth » Sat Oct 13, 2018 1:39 am

We've tried talking to OVH about it but they always blame it on AT&T. (I've heard that AT&T blame it on OVH, wohooo!). Our host before this one was Hetzner, and we had exactly the same issue except to a different ISP. Before that, Google Compute, which was US-based and had routing issues to many European players. I've tried for a long time to get my ISP to fix the routing issues between them and US WoW (I'm based in the UK), and it's the same deal - Blizzard tell me it's my ISP's fault and my ISP tells me it's Blizzard's fault. A latency lowering service is the only way I've found to improve it.

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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by Mithreas » Sat Oct 13, 2018 2:10 am

As someone who quite often has to diagnose routing problems in ISP core networks, it's a fiendishly complicated area. It needs skill, patience and creativity to solve these sorts of problems, as well as a skeptical attitude where just because something is logically impossible doesn't mean it gets ruled out.

Carriers blaming each other is the usual response when they can't find a problem on their side. It doesn't mean that they don't have a problem. It means that they can't find any evidence on their network, so "obviously" the problem is at the other end. Spoiler alert: they are often mistaken.

As a consumer, though, there's very little chance of getting this fixed. Calling your ISP to complain is a good thing, though, because volume of complaints is one of the things that drives behaviour, and if a lot of people are complaining about weird reachability issues, then it's more likely that one of the core engineering team will get some time assigned to take a serious look. Unfortunately, I don't think we're likely to get that volume of complaints to help us out - if a website isn't available for a bit then most people will just shrug, and most gaming services have distributed hosting with no need to cross the Atlantic. [It does seem to be something trans-Atlantic, which isn't too surprising - there are extra hand-offs involved, and carriers have to pay for bandwidth across the ocean, so it's more likely that there are daemons at play that monitor for suspicious traffic and cut it off].
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whoisthisis
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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by whoisthisis » Sat Oct 13, 2018 2:22 am

Near as I can tell. For whatever reason trafffic is being routed thru Sweden of all damn places.

From ATT it goes to telia.net and then to the UK.

So I am blaming the sweeds! :p

PinataPlethora
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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by PinataPlethora » Sat Oct 13, 2018 3:56 am

I don't think it's the Swedes. I'm on AT&T's hardware as well, and the issue I found appeared to be somewhere near the east coast. Running a VPN through Canada solves all of my problems.

Bloodedblade
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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by Bloodedblade » Sun Oct 14, 2018 1:21 am

How does go about setting up a vpn and doing this?

PinataPlethora
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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by PinataPlethora » Sun Oct 14, 2018 2:57 am

You have to pay for it unless you use a free one like Betternet. Unfortunately, the free version of that doesn't let you choose your portal, so it can cause issues, or fail to bypass the routing error you're trying to avoid.

I'm using Avast SecureLine. It's a few dollars per month.

cantalyssa
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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by cantalyssa » Tue Oct 16, 2018 12:37 am

Edit:

This has since been fixed by AT&T for me.
Last edited by cantalyssa on Sun Jul 26, 2020 4:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: More info on the AT&T lag issue.

Post by The Rambling Midget » Tue Oct 16, 2018 12:42 am

Just as a test to see if your lag issues are the result of a routing problem, you can get the trial version of TunnelBear, which allows you to use a VPN for up to 400MB/month. If that doesn't help, your lag could be unrelated to this stuff.
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