Horrible Server Lag on Connery

Discussion in 'Player Support' started by applepie555, Jul 8, 2013.

  1. Bill Hicks

    Connery has been bad for a week now. Almost unplayable.

    All other games play perfectly
  2. Maginnis

    Ok, I tried that ping plotter tool. It appears there's significant packet loss occurring at hops going through Las Vegas datacenters.

    [IMG]
  3. fumz

    What's more inexplicable is the terrible routing. Beaverton > Sacramento > San Jose > LA > Vegas > San Diego. I can see going from San Jose to Vegas to San Diego, but going to Vegas from LA is going ~ 1000 miles out of your way.
  4. AzureKnight

    So... is the latency problem just boiling down to bad routing on SoE's behalf? I can't play this game when i'm have 4-5 second lag spikes. Worse is when I shoot a guy and the sound plays for hitting, but it doesn't actually hit, then I run in to my base and then die from the guy I was gunning at after I'm behind a shield.

    And last time I tried pinging the Connery server, which was about a month ago, I remember through command prompt, out of the bits of data it sent, 3 out of 4 were lost...
  5. fumz

    Yes and no... mostly no though. For sure this is terrible routing. Maginnis and I both hit San Jose; however, I go straight from there to Vegas while he goes to LA, then back ~500 miles north east to Vegas. We then both go to S.D. Terrible routing, and his ping could be better, but it's not what's breaking the game.

    His routing issue is most likely Comcast. His packet loss however (which is a lot and the cause of rubber banding) is through the intermediaries. Sony has to submit a trouble ticket with them to get this done (love the irony).

    Switchnap seems to handle all of Sony's game traffic. For sure they could ask (read: tell) them to clean up their stuff. Even when there's no PL the servers could be running better; for that matter, so could Sony's internal servers. MTR is showing me that although there's no pl right now, there is spiking up to 300+ms on two switchnap hops. These spikes aren't propagating down the line, so ping is still good, but that last hop, on the game server itself, I'm seeing spikes from 29ms to 86ms. That's not good. Sure, 20+ms spikes are normal, but when you start getting 50ms spikes play is effected.

    **edit**

    I should also mention that these are things none of have to do or should be doing. Sony has a team of network engineers who do nothing all day but monitor their servers, as do the intermediaries. We should not have to tell Sony their servers are performing badly; they should already know, in fact, they do. The only question is when are they going to do something about it? Like someone said earlier, not sure if this thread or not, but one day this will be over. Hopefully that day will come soon. Just played a round and it was some of the worst lag I've seen yet. Again, not a pl issue or a routing issue... my lines are clean and routing is good... but for me it seems it's a server issue.
  6. Adder1

    So... any word from the devs on this? At least a "We're aware of this issue and trying to solve it"?
  7. Wstar

    I've having bad issues also. mostly large FPS spikes and input lag. Ill hold down a movement key for a few seconds and let go... ill still be moving for a few seconds after. Almost impossible to play inside buildings or in vehicles.

    I just recently got back into PS2 from beta. Always played on Ultra settings. Now, even on LOW settings I get the same results so i know its the game. I was really looking forward to playing... but this is the 5th day of bad game play.

    I sure hope they fix this soon... or ill have to find another game to play.
  8. applepie555

    In terms of server lag the problem seems to have mostly gone away. Though I've also been getting annoying stuttering/fps drops since the update, thogh that's a different issue
  9. Einharjar

    Keep in mind that this in fact, CAN BE your ISP. I've had issues in the past where the ISP was going through changes or started locking certain connections from me and many others as a method of reducing traffic for their sake.
    This is actually a large issue across many game platforms and has been brought up many times as evidence of "bad business practice". While Installing Diablo 3 for example 3 days after release, many of us with AT&T related ISPs (mainly including their subsidiary companies which are far smaller and usually local to your area only) had data traffic blocking where they restricted bandwidth connecting to the required Blizzard servers. We knew it wasn't Blizzard because we forced our connection to use Google's Servers and the issue went away (eventually letting me install the game on my GFs PC for example).
    After some tedious research, a large swath of us trying to play our games found that many ISPs are resorting to blocking certain IPs with a "restriction" that prevents full traffic flow. Usually, this is with gamers. I had issues with WoW prior, then SC2 there after. By the time the D3 fiasco happened, i was ready to flame Blizzard for Battle.net 2.0 clearly being the cause but it wasn't.

    Usually these happenings can be situational; such as when I was with Comcast in the Puget Sound area in WA state. They were upgrading lines and in the process of doing so, bandwidth would severely drop constantly in later hours and about once a week for 2 months, I would actually lose ALL service. Though this scenario is clearly more obvious than what we are experiencing here; all i'm trying to say is that PS2 has "two deliveries" involved in your connection. That's PS2s servers, and your ISPs servers. Your ISP is the one truly responsible for getting your packets to and from you and the MMO server. Most of the time, the bad "routing" is due to the ISP. Maybe a local HUB is being revamped. Thus your connection is being routed worse than a flight trying to leave chicago during an impending blizzard.
    We have no idea.
    Nor does SOE.
    And if we complain?
    The ISP is just going to say "it's SOEs fault" while like wise, SOE will blame your ISP. Eventually, this is going to have to stop. I hope one day game companies will release their own "internet" connection option so those of us gamers can use a server catered to us, not snipping our bandwidth simply to make room for the Netflix and Hulu streaming families. If I pay for 25MBs, I better have that full conduit available for my gaming. In fact for any connection. There is no statements on the contract about them snipping your connection as they see fit to only specific services because they feel gaming traffic is too high and the demand for HD streaming should be top priority. The reserve the right to change your TOTAL bandwidth, but nothing is ever stated about a bias regarding certain connection using applications. I don't see how it's fair for ANYONE, INCLUDING the Developers of the Games.
  10. fumz

    To be sure, there are good isp's and bad isp's. It's also true that some have been caught throttling bandwidth; Comcast was caught actually resetting connections every 9 min a few years back as a way of disrupting p2p (torrent) traffic. I forget the name of the apps they used, there have been a few. I'm sure they haven't stopped trying to limit bandwidth usage above and beyond setting caps.

    However, if the idea is that isp's are the cause of people's issues because they're actively trying to reduce game traffic... then no. Games don't actually use a lot of bandwidth. There really isn't that much data going back and forth. You may have a 6 or 20Mbit line, but the game isn't using it. The back and forth game use is in the KB's, not MB's. Also,isp's have no control over large intermediaries (internet backbone, eg level 3) nor do they control the smaller providers which the game uses (in the case of PS2 switchnap). These intermediaries are independent companies. While an individual isp may gain something by throttling a customers traffic, intermediaries have no dog in that fight, and it would be a waste of their time, energy, and money to sniff all the traffic routed through their servers trying to distinguish a game packet from p2p packet to an email.

    The internet is a volatile place; routing is never always a straight shot; latency and packet loss happen from time to time. This is just a part of life. To blame the realities of the internet on an isp is to misplace blame. This issue is huge. Either every isp in the country is in on it, or 2,000 guys have all decided to start using lag switches. Since both of those two options are absurd, it's probably safe to assume this is server related. Sure, some guys have bad pl, others may have terrible routing (much worse than the pic above), while other guys aren't asking their wives to quit watching beyonce on youtube while they're in a rough session... but by and large this is a Sony server issue, resolve only by Sony.
  11. applepie555

    I tried it and there appears to be 20% packet loss at 66.209.72.10, otherwise no apparent issues. However today (when I ran the test) I didn't have that horrible lag (compared to in the video). It seems that it has improved a lot since GU12 came out, however there can still be huge spikes. At least they are more isolated and go away after a while. So it seems that, since GU12 helped it, it is a server side problem, however if it was server side then everyone would get it.
    Maybe the routing got better after gu12..?
  12. applepie555

    Is the server hosted in Vegas or San Diego? I know the SOE offices are in San Diego, but SOE might not be hosting it onsite. I don't see it saying San Diego anywhere, plus, according to (http://wiki.planetside-universe.com/ps/Server#PlanetSide) the last Planetside 1 server was moved from the east coast to Las Vegas, so it makes sense that SOE would host the Planetside 2 servers there as well..
  13. wwwjdx

    chop chop chop. many people reporting this. Count me in. Maybe someone at sony dev will notice the trend here.
  14. Maginnis

    I contacted Switchnap a few minutes ago and notified them of our issue. The rep I spoke to agreed to pass the information along to their engineers with my contact information. It will be interesting to see if I get a call back.
  15. Inu

    when my sunderer started scaling the ammo tower sideways and then flying through the air like a rocket ship, thought an admin was screwing with me, and then I saw everything flying around like it was caught in a sharknado.
  16. fumz

    Every geo location trace I've run says the ip is San Diego; somewhere near Broadway.
    It's highly unlikely (read: not gonna happen) that Switchnap is going to respond to your requests in any meaningful way. At best they'll tell you to contact Sony and have them open a trouble ticked with us (switchnap). We're not their customer, Sony is. Technically speaking, we have no interest. If the rep is cool, you may get a call back, but as far as getting something done, highly unlikely.

    You have to remember that although we're running these traces, switchnap runs more than just PS2 through their servers. As far as I can tell from the limited digging I've done, they do all Sony's online games. More importantly, if routers are congested (anywhere along the path) ICMP traffic (ping) is the first to be deprioritized, so it's not uncommon for a busy router to report large ping spikes if it's congested. What you have to look for is if the spikes propagate down the line. If every hop thereafter is high, then you have a problem. If not, well, then it's probably just a busy server prioritizing udp traffic over icmp.

    Last night I was playing and I got what felt like a huge frame rate drop, much like guys have been saying when their fps drops to 5 or below. However, I have Dxtory's fps overlay running and my fps at the time was actually 90+. It felt like the atmosphere turned to molasses; very strange. I thought about the other thread that suggested certain spots on the map were worse than others, so I ran in and out of the building several times. Sure enough, I had the issue consistently. I'm going to spend some time today trying to figure out where exactly I was (new, don't know the maps yet).
  17. Maginnis

    Here's a longer term log. Roughly 6.5 hours of logging.

    [IMG]
  18. DoctorXqY

    If the Connery servers are hosted in Vegas, that's awesome news for me, living here. Not so good news for me if the server lag is originating from the servers here.
  19. fumz

    The internet is a volatile place. If you run pingplotter for hours chances are slim your reports are going to look clean. This is bad though, no doubt. Open pingplotter and under sampling set # of times to trace to 1000. Set the trace interval to 1 second. Under statistics set samples to 1000. Run the trace. This should take ~ 15 minutes and is more than sufficient to get a clear picture.

    No matter what though, your routing is jacked and your biggest problem is level 3 (large intermediary). You can try calling Comcast about this; most likely you just have to wait for level 3 to clean up what's going on though. If it's consistently bad Comcast "might" do something about it, but it's unlikely they're going to change routing.

    From San Jose I take 10 hops to the game server, you take 15, and you have pl on 7 of those hops:
    [IMG]

    Here's the corresponding mtr:
    Code:
    |------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |                                      WinMTR statistics                                  |
    |                      Host              -  %  | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
    |------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
    |      xx-xx-xxx-x.dsl.dynamic.sonic.net -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |    7 |    9 |  151 |    7 |
    |          gig1-30.cr1.colaca01.sonic.net -    1 | 1192 | 1191 |    6 |    8 |  65 |    7 |
    |              po3.cr1.lsatca11.sonic.net -    1 | 1192 | 1191 |    7 |    8 |  55 |    8 |
    |            0.xe-5-1-0.gw.pao1.sonic.net -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |    7 |    9 |  70 |    8 |
    |      0.xe-6-0-0.gw.equinix-sj.sonic.net -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |    7 |  10 |  68 |    8 |
    |                  eqx.10ge.sjc.bboi.net -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |    8 |  10 |  29 |  10 |
    |        lv-ten1-2-sjc11-ten4-8.bboi.net -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |  26 |  29 |  114 |  27 |
    |              switch-vegas-bboi.bboi.net -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |  27 |  30 |  48 |  28 |
    |    te0-0-0-4.las-core7-2.switchnap.com -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |  27 |  29 |  37 |  30 |
    |        te2-6.las-core2-1.switchnap.com -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |  27 |  32 |  383 |  28 |
    |        po10.las-agg7s1-1.switchnap.com -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |  27 |  33 |  263 |  28 |
    |              demarc1.soe.switchnap.com -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |  27 |  29 |  39 |  28 |
    |          vl3101.lvssw-1.sonyonline.net -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |  27 |  28 |  66 |  33 |
    |        lvspsn-liv-gw01.station.sony.com -    0 | 1196 | 1196 |  27 |  28 |  63 |  28 |
    |________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
      WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider
    On a side note: internet looks particularly wonky today. http://www.internetpulse.net/
  20. GrinNfool

    Gonna go ahead and bump this since its related. I am getting unplayable lag on connery currently, sunderers flying sideways, vanu flying back to the moon, dogs and cats living together, and tanks deciding to blast off into space. Tried other games with similar bandwidth demands, no issues, pings to everything look strong, don't think its on my end, but it doesn't seem to effect everyone either.... so no clue whats going on, but its not playable for a lot of people