Disconnections

Dear crew, thank you for the server environment.
Obviously you are doing a great job, since you attract all european players.
Sadly, i get discos all the time. Just like today. I enter the ded (alpha or beta get me the same effect) and after a minute, i get the disco sign. And after maybe half a minute, it's gone for some seconds and comes again. Impossible to play that way. I try to reconnect to the ded but that helps rarely.

Now due to you huge success this more or less destroyed MWLL for me, since i don't plan to play on non-european servers. So if you could please try to solve that problem....I myself will eagerly participate, so if there is something I could do, don't hesitate to ask for.

EvilTechno

You probably don't want to hear this, but the problem is on your end.
Our datacenter is located in Falkenstein/Vogtland and has a pretty good pipe to the net. Few people have problems like you describe. Either your hardware just can't deal with populated servers, or your ISP has a crappy connection to Falkenstein, for some reason. In any case, there is nothing I can do.

edit: check your router aswell.

---

If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst, at once, into the sky
It would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/05/2012 08:35PM by haarp.

Thank you for the answer.

I am pretty sure you are right, given the fact that only a minority got these problems.
But since these problems only occur on your servers I was hoping for a little more. What's the difference between you and other servers? And "checking" is easily done, my router is feeling fine, thanks for asking.
So what could be a problem, what did other people do to solve their problem? Update Punkbuster, change a specific setting, open a certain port? Sounds all strange to me since other servers run smoothly.

Have a nice day.

EvilTechno

I cant really pinpoint the problem from here. What is your ping to the server?

It could be that your ISP uses some weird kind of throttling or simply has some strange route to Falkenstein. You could try running a traceroute:

tracert cjw.dyndns.biz

but I doubt that would help us much.

---

If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst, at once, into the sky
It would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

EvilTechno, what is the upload and download bandwidth of your connection? (Make a test on [www.speedtest.net] and post the result here maybe.)

Note: I know, that the actual bandwidth is not the problem here, I am interested in it nonetheless .

Hi Spooky

did the test:
ping: 15 ms
download: 5,67 Mbps
upload: 0,61 Mbps

Just had a great Solaris Arena on Funbocks Gamma with up to 6 players.

Ok, so, may be you have the same problem as me. As I explained in game, I seem to experience severe UDP packet loss, when there are lots of players on the server (even 16 seems to be enough for me to notice some oddities, 20 and more and it gets completely unplayable). Ever since 0.6 this problem got worse for me, before 0.6 I didn't notice it that often, but now it happens definitely every time I am on a server with more than 20 players and it really got unplayable.

The culprit in my case is my RouterModem from the ISP, it doesn't seem to deal well with UDP packets that are large and come in great numbers in a short time. I searched around a bit for a UDP packet loss testing tool (testing for UDP packet loss is not so straight forward, since it's a connection less protocol, with no handshaking abilities) and found this one: [tptest.sourceforge.net] (exe: [dl.dropbox.com] ).

You can play around there and do some testings. My own testings look conclusive with large 1600 byte packets, I experience severe UDP packet loss there, depending on the Modem I use and the server I choose for testing. When I test on another internet connection for comparison, I get no packet loss whatsoever (or very very little). I don't know if Crysis Wars/MWLL really does send 1600 byte packets to the client, I only ever saw 1500 ones on my end coming in.

Start it up, go to File - Advanced Mode, set the Test time to 60 seconds and the mode to "Receive" for instance and play around with packet sizes of 1500 and 1600 bytes and the Packets per second and observe at how many packets per second you get packet loss. Note: the Datarate (bits per second) shouldn't exceed your download bandwidth (or upload bandwidth when sending). 5670000 bits/sec in your case for instance (e.g. 400 packets per second when using 1500 byte packets).



I have sent you my results per PM on the MWLL forum.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/07/2016 09:28AM by Spooky.

Zathrus has made some extensive tests in that regard:
[forum.mechlivinglegends.net]
[forum.mechlivinglegends.net]

The Crysis Wars server loves to send massive packets. Now what happens to them in transit I can not tell. If a modem receives the original packet, it might be too big for it. If it's broken up, the modem might receive short bursts of lots of packets, which can also be problematic.

---

If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst, at once, into the sky
It would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

I just a nice game on Funbocks Alpha.
It started with 8 people and was stable for a long time. When more and more connected, i got finally discoed.
That happened when 22 people were online. So limiting the server to 20 people might solve the problem.

Or a new router modem.

---

-I would if I could, but I can't so I won't.

Before i go out and buy a new router modem, it might be a good idea to identify the problem, don't you think so?

There is no problem for anyone else, it's only on your end, you've confirmed this yourself by having no issues with smaller player count. Borrow another router from someone if you can to confirm, but I doubt Haarp will be lowering the player count just for your isolated issue.

Quote
EvilTechno
Before i go out and buy a new router modem, it might be a good idea to identify the problem, don't you think so?

True that . First, tell me the exact setup of your network and the exact models of modems and/or routers that you currently use, including the router or modem that you have from your ISP.

We are all based all over the world, with various ISP's and modem/routers.

Where are you based and what ISP's do you have access to?

Finally got my own problems fixed with the public IP from my ISP (i.e. by letting my own router directly connect to the internet) .

So the issue was a crappy ISP-issued router?

---

If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst, at once, into the sky
It would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

Quote
haarp
So the issue was a crappy ISP-issued router?

Yes, well I knew or strongly suspected that it was (once again) the ISP's Modem-Router's fault (see our old PMs ). It simply does not handle the frequency and flood of UDP messages well that often occur in various games (and especially in MWLL). And my guess is that all or most users that are experiencing similar symptoms like in this thread or similar to mine are suffering from the same basic problem (i.e. an unusually high amount of UDP packets are lost somewhere on the way). Some routers/firewalls even deliberately drop such packets because they identify it as an "open tear attack" (-SM-SUCKER- has that problem).

Who knows, may be there are a lot more users than we know or suspect that have such a problem and are unable to play properly ever since 0.6. While they were able or barely able to play before that, due to the lower network traffic. But we all know that the voices of keeping the player limit down were loud before 0.6 as well and it's conceivable that those who really had issues after 20, 22, or 24 players also suffered from this (while not as severe yet).

I can also guess now that all the issues I had with over 24 player servers in the past were also due to that problem. It simply did not manifest itself that clearly yet, because it was simply still playable otherwise. With 0.6 though it became downright unplayable for me whenever there were more than ~16 players on a server, which immediately let me think that this might be a UDP flooding problem.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/02/2012 10:33AM by Spooky.

Hi guys,

Spooky told to write here about the lag problem too. I tried the TPtest with 1500 bytes packet size and 1000 packets per second. I lost totally 9 packets and 0 when i try half the packets per second (cable 32/1,5Mbit). But cant get it send anything over the UDP standard ethernet limit of 1500bytes, Jumbo packets are enabled in my ethernet card, so reason is still unknown. I am using cable modem directly to computer and this model is used up to 50Mbit. Its 6 years old Scientific Atlanta Webstar.

I called my ISP support to get informations about UPD packets limits of my modem, they say it should be able to handle big packets. They set my modem on monitoring so they will record packet transition and eventually they will be able to say whats causing the bandwith drop in the game or whatever is happening when the lag strikes.