Hi Guys
Long time since I played or visited the forum.
Just recently got back into things but virtually every server I go on I end up getting kicked due to excesive lag, even though I have 4x the bandwidth when I used to play with no problems.
Done a bit of investigating, running traceroutes to various servers and it seems that there is a hop in paris that is common to all the problems and is causing a time out.
The server is Hosting-CMS.TH2.b3g-telecom.com (always hop number 13)
I know this is a long shot, but has anyone got any ideas about getting round this problem???
Sample traceroute below:
Hop IP Address Host Name Sent Recv RTT Av RTT Min RTT Max RTT % Loss
1 89.241.224.1 [Unknown] 1 1 31 ms 31 ms 31 ms 31 ms 0.000%
2 62.24.222.201 rtr001.bir.opaltelecom.net 1 1 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms 0.000%
3 62.24.254.1 gig-9-1-rtr001.man.opaltelecom.net 1 1 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms 0.000%
4 62.24.254.178 gig-6-1-rtr002.man.opaltelecom.net 1 1 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms 0.000%
5 62.24.254.17 gig-9-1-rtr001.thn.opaltelecom.net 1 1 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms 0.000%
6 62.24.250.225 gig-0-0-rtr002.thn.opaltelecom.net 1 1 63 ms 63 ms 63 ms 63 ms 0.000%
7 195.66.224.185 [Unknown] 1 1 78 ms 78 ms 78 ms 78 ms 0.000%
8 130.117.2.5 v3490.mpd01.par01.atlas.cogentco.com 1 1 62 ms 62 ms 62 ms 62 ms 0.000%
9 130.117.2.49 g5-1.mpd01.par01.atlas.cogentco.com 1 1 78 ms 78 ms 78 ms 78 ms 0.000%
10 130.117.1.50 v68.mpd01.par01.atlas.cogentco.com 1 1 94 ms 94 ms 94 ms 94 ms 0.000%
11 130.117.243.134 bg3-two.demarc.cogentco.com 1 1 94 ms 94 ms 94 ms 94 ms 0.000%
12 217.66.121.2 ge-020.Jun-2.Th2.b3g-telecom.com 1 1 94 ms 94 ms 94 ms 94 ms 0.000%
13 217.66.119.17 Hosting-CMS.TH2.b3g-telecom.com 1 1 94 ms 94 ms 94 ms 94 ms 0.000%
14 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
15 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
16 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
17 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
18 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
19 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
20 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
21 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
22 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
23 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
24 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
25 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
26 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
27 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
28 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
29 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
30 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
31 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
32 --- [No response] --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
33 103.58.54.55 2789079378 0 ms2019981922 ms1952804398 ms842020410 ms4737476544457553600000000000000.000%
Lag on most servers
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Half Track
- Private First Class
- Posts: 36
- Joined: Wed Aug 17, 2005 8:36 pm
- Location: Boston UK
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bzflaginator
- Private First Class
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- Location: Upstate, New York, USA
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I dont believe anyone has even thought about this. Maybe a few of the devs or admins, but this is the first Ive heard of this. And yes I too have noticed a large jump in ping. I used to play GU, but the lag there has become overwhelming and people are being accused of cheating due to it. If someone would like to take a chance at it, ALOT of people will benefit.
"He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals."
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Half Track
- Private First Class
- Posts: 36
- Joined: Wed Aug 17, 2005 8:36 pm
- Location: Boston UK
Been Thinking! Ouch!
I have been thinking about the situation and To me the most obvious solutions are the most radical.
1)Move house. Other people in different locations don't seem to have the same problem, their route to the servers are different.
2)Change ISP and hope that their location means that i am not routed through this troublesome server.
Both of which are not entirely prctical........
........which brings me to a possible solution. If I used a proxy server to access the bzflag servers my route would be different and (hopefully) would avoid the server hop I am getting timed out on.
The trouble is I have no have never used a proxy server and am not sure that bzflag servers will accept connections from proxies.
Has anyone had experience of this or can someone let me know whether it will work?
If so, recommend a good proxy service?
TIA
Half Track
1)Move house. Other people in different locations don't seem to have the same problem, their route to the servers are different.
2)Change ISP and hope that their location means that i am not routed through this troublesome server.
Both of which are not entirely prctical........
........which brings me to a possible solution. If I used a proxy server to access the bzflag servers my route would be different and (hopefully) would avoid the server hop I am getting timed out on.
The trouble is I have no have never used a proxy server and am not sure that bzflag servers will accept connections from proxies.
Has anyone had experience of this or can someone let me know whether it will work?
If so, recommend a good proxy service?
TIA
Half Track
If you proxy through something else, you will have more lag (imagine something like 3 or 4 seconds at the minumum) and it will be TCP only. This means that 70% of the servers will kick you as soon as you fire your weapon. The fact that you can't get past hop 13 in the traceroute doesn't mean the 13th hop is bad. It just means that hops 14 to the destination might be ignoring ICMP ping messages either completely, or for ones with an expired Time-To-Life (maximum number of hops).Half Track wrote:I have been thinking about the situation and To me the most obvious solutions are the most radical.
1)Move house. Other people in different locations don't seem to have the same problem, their route to the servers are different.
2)Change ISP and hope that their location means that i am not routed through this troublesome server.
Both of which are not entirely prctical........
........which brings me to a possible solution. If I used a proxy server to access the bzflag servers my route would be different and (hopefully) would avoid the server hop I am getting timed out on.
The trouble is I have no have never used a proxy server and am not sure that bzflag servers will accept connections from proxies.
Has anyone had experience of this or can someone let me know whether it will work?
If so, recommend a good proxy service?
TIA
Half Track
A traceroute works by sending pings to the destination IP address, each time increasing the maximum number of hops. When the maximum number of hops is reached, a server typically responds back saying that the TTL expired. This lets you determine the route. Some servers block this information for security reasons. The machines in question might not even be controlled by your ISP, but maybe by the ISP's ISP, or by the destinations ISP. For quite a while with my cable internet I was unable to get a traceroute of hops 3 to 8, but it would continue past that point.
You're probably thinking of an HTTP proxy for web browsing. A local proxy server running inside your network is probably okay. The main issue is when your ISP pipes the data of it's customers through a transparent proxy, because the IP address won't always match up. This could cause authentication issues with the bzflag login system.yo mama! wrote:i think that my house is on a proxy server. It worked for a while but then i had the same problem as you half track. So i restarted and now it has lost the world cache files and i cannot play anymore. the point dont use a proxy server!
"In addition to knowing the secrets of the Universe, I can assure you that I am also quite potty trained." -Koenma (Yu Yu Hakusho)
check your pings
yo mama, you should be able to delete your config and cache files and "start fresh". There's an option on the menu to also ignore and/or reset cache file lifetimes too that you can try. Either way, if you can't play any more, you should report a problem to the sf.net/projects/bzflag support request tracker or stop by the irc channel for assistance.
half track, I pretty much concur with everything blast said -- your traceroute is basically worthless given some upstream switch is (probably) blocking icmp traffic and that is completely out of your control. What you can probably still check is your basic ping times to the various servers as well as the list server (i.e., ping my.bzflag.org) and see what those numbers look like. That's sort of a "base latency" and you're not really going to get any better than that in the game -- you'll probably be worse, but the numbers shouldn't be drasticly different.
If they are drasticly different, e.g. if you have a base ping of 100ms but in the game your lag is 300ms, then that might indicate some other problem altogether. That might indicate you're video card sucks with respect to the graphics quality or resolution settings you're using, or you're playing on servers that have too many players. The latter is a frequent problem of modem players and some others -- they can't play on servers that have more than about 7 players without flooding their net connection. This theoretically could happen on other low-rate connections too, of course.
half track, I pretty much concur with everything blast said -- your traceroute is basically worthless given some upstream switch is (probably) blocking icmp traffic and that is completely out of your control. What you can probably still check is your basic ping times to the various servers as well as the list server (i.e., ping my.bzflag.org) and see what those numbers look like. That's sort of a "base latency" and you're not really going to get any better than that in the game -- you'll probably be worse, but the numbers shouldn't be drasticly different.
If they are drasticly different, e.g. if you have a base ping of 100ms but in the game your lag is 300ms, then that might indicate some other problem altogether. That might indicate you're video card sucks with respect to the graphics quality or resolution settings you're using, or you're playing on servers that have too many players. The latter is a frequent problem of modem players and some others -- they can't play on servers that have more than about 7 players without flooding their net connection. This theoretically could happen on other low-rate connections too, of course.