Problem with hosting - lag wehn i hosting

[aeras]

when i do hosting i have lag to others boats and is not possible to play.
I have made the changes in firewall ZoneAlarm and router Zyxel 650.
Any idea???

[aeras]

My adsl is 384/128 and my PC 3GHz/1GB Ram

[Skorpa]

My guess is that your adsl is not enough. I currently have a 512/128 and have the same problem, only can host 5 boats with lag free.

I already changed to a 4096/256 but it´s not active yet, so in a couple of days/weeks I´ll post the result.

[aeras]

is possible all the hosts to have 4mb asdl for supply 8 players
I don't think! Somethink we do rong my friend in our setup ???

[Popeye]

ADSL download speed has little to do with the speed of data travling to your computer and back out to the net it more a measure of volumn. A ping time is more important for smooth hosting of online games. try testing it at ( http://www.dslreports.com/ ).You can join the site for free and do the line quality test. There is a great deal of info there so poke around and learn about how things work.
As for ADSL its not all that fast for gaming, the best would be a cable modem. I was able to host up to 6 boats with a dialup connection although ill bet the others experiance some lag but more than 6 was unplayable. Ibelive my ping times were in the 70's at the best.I now have cable and As I wright this my ping to california is 11ms. Anyting under 20ms should work well for gaming.

Popeye

[Popeye]

Here is my results from a ping test. I misquoted, 11 was to the east coast. I live in newjersey. Youll notice the first hop is the most important as that is your connection to the internet the rest of the hops reflect the first hop plus all the others before it

http://www.dslreports.com/quality/nil/1694823

I hope that link works if not Ill post a copy here.

[admiral 1]

128 K that is bit / s is more then enough for hosting an 8 boat race.

anything under 125 ms ping would be okay too.
Those that join should watch out for the connection quality, when joining a race a ping is indicated from * to **** .

A 3 ghz rig should be adequate also.

I would start to look for video settings that are to demanding of the CPU, and background applications that eat up CPU cycles and possibly your internet bandwith.

Lastly consider wheather your ISP guarantees the bandwith you signed for, or find out what their devider is. AKA to how many clients the bandwith was sold, figuring that on average you only use yours 1/24 of the time, you may have to share the bandwith with 24 other of their clients....

What may be of help a bit is to have your ISP turn off inter-leafing for your connection. That may hurt the stability of the connection slightly but would boost speed.

BTW. cable modems have the same basic problems as DSL.

The only real help is a dedicated line (1 client) with high enough (reserved) bandwith. (128 K is more then enough)

An ISDN connection has lower, only 20ms ping compared to 40 ms for my first hop with 2Mbit DSL. Between two clients that knocks 40 ms off of a 90 ms ping (Suburban Germany - Suburban France) that's almost 50%.

[Popeye]

Theo makes a good point about other programs running in the backround. some virus protection programs slow things down quite a bit. If your ping times seem good, your computer specs are great so hardware may not be the issue. it would then fall to a software issue or more like a software tweek.

One way to have a peak at what your computer is doing is to monitor aspects if it threw system monitor. In win 2000 its called "performance" it can be found under "administrative tools" in the controll pannel, I believe win xp is very similar. I keep an eye on ;
1, Available MBytes
2, % processor time
3, network interface bytes recieved/sec and sent/sec
This is a very basic tool, you can't tell what these things are doing but you can see the activity, you will certianly be able to see how much bandwith VSK is using, as each person joins your race the bytes/sec increases. The processor will run full tilt as you play but see what its doing when it should be idle. Mine runns at about 1% when it doing nothing. If you want to know more try "filemon". get it at http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/filemon.shtml . This little gem will tell you what files are being accessed, it should give you a hint as to what program is chewing up processor cycles etc.
post back here and let me know if im boring you or not. I would hope with more details about what your computer is doing we can get you hosting 8 boats.
I dont clame to be a computer expert as many guys here know much more than I do, but I have fun figuring these things out and have found a bunch of freeware tools for doing so.

Popeye

[Oobie]

Not boring at all James, very useful actually. Like some others, I have a 512/128 ADSL connection and I would have thought it would host an 8 boat race lying on it's back (I used to host 6 boat races on my 56k modem with no lag). But no. Even a 6 boat race gives some boats lag when I host. Now that is boring.

I'll look up some of those things and see if I can get my shitbox running a bit faster. I have a feeling that Apache, ColdFusion and Flash Comm Server might be dogging me a bit.... :O

[admiral 1]

Connection Speed differs with distance and geographical location (number of hops).

Oceania will ping > 200 ms
France (VSK Server) > 70 ms
Norway > 90 ms
USA > 90 ms
Munich > 65 ms

my first hop eats up 43 ms

If you're host in Sydney Australia on 5 th of april around 20:00 local time expect pings > 350 with Europeans.

1 192.168.1.254 0ms 0ms 0ms TTL: 0 (doorman.admirals.de ok)
2 217.5.98.75 41ms 42ms 40ms TTL: 0 (No rDNS)
3 217.237.154.50 40ms 39ms 40ms TTL: 0 (No rDNS)
4 62.154.89.122 45ms 45ms 44ms TTL: 0 (l-ea1.L.DE.net.DTAG.DE ok)
5 62.154.5.245 217ms 218ms 216ms TTL: 0 (paix-gw12.SFO.US.net.DTAG.DE ok)
6 203.208.168.213 218ms 218ms 216ms TTL: 0 (No rDNS)
7 203.208.168.121 218ms 218ms 216ms TTL: 0 (ge-0-3-0.plapx-cr2.ix.singtel.com probable bogus rDNS: No DNS)
8 203.208.148.58 376ms 374ms 374ms TTL: 0 (No rDNS)
9 61.88.179.18 389ms 389ms 388ms TTL: 0 (ge-wan3-1.14vrc76f06.optus.net.au ok)
10 61.88.151.10 389ms 388ms 387ms TTL: 0 (Webcentral.14vrc76f06.optus.net.au ok)
11 203.147.255.105 388ms 390ms 387ms TTL: 0 (vl5.mls1.wic.server-web.com probable bogus rDNS: No DNS)
12 203.147.139.162 388ms 391ms 389ms TTL:115 (wic141d.server-web.com ok)

that will make any machine a lousy host

:p

[aeras]

Thank you all for the helpfull information.
I'll do some tests at next days and i hope to find the solution in order to host 8 boats!!!
You are all wellcome

Thanks again

[Skiffie]

Most issues I've found with lag have been due to the processor being clogged - try starting with those suggestions first, then progress to the detailed network things like ping time etc :beer:

[Skorpa]

About ping, where/how can I see my ping to the vsk3 server?

[Popeye]

Here is a link to Analog X. There a couple of tools one of wich you can use to ping any address you want. If it doesnt work properly you may have to adjust your firewall settings to allow the ping.

http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/itrc.htm

Popeye

[admiral 1]

START | RUN 'ping www.virtualskipper.com'

or open DOS window.

type 'ping www.virtualskipper.com' ENTER
do 'ping /?' ENTER to see options.

AFAIK you can safely asume that the game-servers are co-located there.

Also can check your firewall log, for entrys from vsk-game server and then ping the IP mentionend in the log.