Lag in TT, no lag in EJ

[Ruien]

Connecting from Asia (China). Connection has been stable all day through multiple zones (EC, WC, Kith, Neriak, DL, KC, EJ).

Upon zoning into TT from EJ, ping rises to 2000+ (in some cases 9000+) and I get disconnected. Logging in again into TT, I can move a few more feet before being disconnected again, lag is still terrible. Several attempts later, I'm able to zone back into EJ, and lag again disappears and everything is normal.

Skeptical, I tried this three times with the same results. I also reduced all graphics settings (and set clip plane slider to 0), with no effect. Time to /con self is primary measure of response time; in EJ it's quick and stable. In TT, it takes seconds or longer.

In short, what's different about EJ and TT? Is TT running on a different server than EJ? Is there a different network path / IP for that zone?

I may need to run wireshark to see if I can debug this, but hoping a dev knows the network topology and can identify this.

[Madbad]

the commies dont want you getting to seb

[Laugher]

I'm not sure if this still happens somewhat frequently but there was an odd issue with TT having random lag spikes a while back, I know I've seen other posts about it and have had it happen myself a few times in years past (Illinois, U.S. here)

[Ruien]

Something is definitely broken, but like Madbad I suspected the commies more than the server; guildies weren't seeing problems in TT today, but I was.

More realistically, it's obviously not any sort of Chinese firewall, but rather the connection. If TT runs on a different physical IP than EJ does, the network routing will be different and there could be times when one is worse than the other. A dev could tell us which other zones run on the same infrastructure as TT and that could help to isolate and test the problem.

If that were what's happening, it could explain issues others saw with TT in the past, although this is the first time I personally have had problems here.

[towbes]

Would be curious to see your wireshark dumps from this

[Ruien]

This problem is proving to be serious and repeatable. I left for several hours and tried again now, and it's exactly the same. I'm not entirely convinced it's a network problem given what I'm seeing in wireshark.

Specifically, Wireshark seems to indicate that the server being communicated with in EJ is the same as in TT. Several other IPs are associated with the zoning process, but the lag itself doesn't hit until about 40 seconds after zoning in to TT.

The actual wireshark data dump may include sensitive data so I've included the timestamped packet summaries instead, along with a time log of various events:


Seconds -- Event
0 Started wireshark. I'm in EJ, /con'ing self, everything is fine and normal.
22 Start zoning from EJ to TT
65 Loading bar appears
82 Zoned into TT. ping is normal and /con self is responsive
124 Lag hits, ping rises to 3554ms according to F11 UI widget, although /con self still continues to appear (with delay less than 3554ms)
170 /con self becomes unresponsive, not returning anything. F11 widget still shows >3000 ms ping, and con messages do not appear even after that long
248 Try to zone back into EJ
370 "You have been disconnected" message
392 Crash back to EQ login screen
432 Closed EQ. Some more UDP packets continued for a few seconds afterward, then stopped.


Attached p99wireshark4_min_summaries.txt.tar.bz2.zip . Due to size constraints I had to compress with bzip2 first since zip is terrible (and this forum requires .zip extension).

Edit: I should also mention that I see the identical problem under both Linux and Windows. It's not a Linux (or Windows) issue.

[Pscottdai]

Been having the same issue the last three days from Japan.

[towbes]

Please check out this thread and run the program there so we can compare logs. Having same issue with TT in addition to other problems from that thread

http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=197923&page=2

[Ruien]

Okay, we have three people seeing the same issue with TT. However, I don't think this is related to other general issues brought up in towbes' thread.

In my case, I only have a problem with TT, and nothing else, so it's not related to packet loss. Would really appreciate if a dev had some insight into this.

[Laugher]

http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=91754&highlight=nilbog+teeth
http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=126291&highlight=teeth+lagging
http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99238&highlight=trakanon

*edit* not sure if same issue like I said before, but here's a little more on what might be the same issue

[Ruien]

Okay, thanks Laugher. It's the same issue, I was just under the impression that it had been resolved already. Guess not, and this is the first time I've seen it.