Lag/MS

[Frostshockk]

Hi, sorry if there has been a post about this, but lately, the past few days, my MS has been spiking consistently throughout the day. I usually play around 40-50 MS, but I have been spiking up to as high as 350 for 20-30 minute increments at a time. My internet is fine, I play other games without any lag, CS:GO and Team Fortress 2.

Any idea of WoW MS being buggy lately? Or could it be something wrong with my internet?

Any help is appreciated

[Darsithis]

Are you using a wireless connection?

[Justignoreme]

There has been an issue with this since January and posts have been made on official forums as well as broadband internet forums. For whatever reason certain ISPs, (namely cable internet) have been routing their connections through cogent hosted servers which connect to Blizzards servers with considerable amounts of lag and high latency during peak usage hours in the evenings and afternoons, and stretching into nighttime. Right now, in the morning Im enjoying 30-40 ms, around 4 PM it goes to 70-80, then come 8 PM its over 100 with spikes to 300 sometimes 1000. These cogent servers cannot handle the load and slow down. Why they are being routed through these poor servers has yet to be explained but when I can do a traceroute to an EU server and get better latency than one from a server literally a state over, it's a real aggravation.

[Frostshockk]

Yes, I am directly connected to my router through a long ethernet cord. I am in my bed room on the second floor, and the router is in the basement. I have Verizon FiOS in the northeast if that helps anything.

[Justignoreme]

Yes, I am directly connected to my router through a long ethernet cord. I am in my bed room on the second floor, and the router is in the basement. I have Verizon FiOS in the northeast if that helps anything.

Do a traceroute to your server. if you see a cogentco hop along the way to blizzard's att/attnet servers that is where the slow down is.

[Frostshockk]

Okay, thank you. Is there anything I can do to fix it after analyzing the traceroute?

[Loaf Lord]

There has been an issue with this since January and posts have been made on official forums as well as broadband internet forums. For whatever reason certain ISPs, (namely cable internet) have been routing their connections through cogent hosted servers which connect to Blizzards servers with considerable amounts of lag and high latency during peak usage hours in the evenings and afternoons, and stretching into nighttime. Right now, in the morning Im enjoying 30-40 ms, around 4 PM it goes to 70-80, then come 8 PM its over 100 with spikes to 300 sometimes 1000. These cogent servers cannot handle the load and slow down. Why they are being routed through these poor servers has yet to be explained but when I can do a traceroute to an EU server and get better latency than one from a server literally a state over, it's a real aggravation.

Is time warner one of these ISPs? This sounds exactly like the latency problem I've been having for about 3ish weeks now.

[Darsithis]

Do a traceroute to your server. if you see a cogentco hop along the way to blizzard's att/attnet servers that is where the slow down is.

Slightly off-topic, but I work at a company who has an office next to Congentco's downtown Chicago office. They once offered us the office but we turned it down.

OT: If you find the slowdown I'm not sure what you can really do to correct it. It's not exactly in your hands. Is there a way to...override or get around a server on the way to Blizzard's?

[Loaf Lord]

Something similar to this happened a while back. Blizzard basically has to compile a bunch of evidence to show them or else cogent will just point the fingers at someone else and claim it ain't their problem.

[Araxom]

Hi Frost,

You may want to run a Trace Route to get a better picture of your connnection strength. There's a lot of things that could come to play here, but this would be a good place to start. Let me know if you have any difficulty getting that going.

/Araxom

[Rowlga]

I'm not the OP, but I've been having the same trouble lately for the past month or two. Once or twice a night it gets so bad the game is unplayable for a couple minutes, and is frustratingly sluggish for much longer than that. When it's at its worst, I can see people moving around and doing everything they're doing, but when I use my abilities they highlight but don't cast. When I move I don't actually move in the eyes of the server and everyone else and I can tell because my pet stays still. After half a minute it'll get a little better and let me move, but I'm half-useless for the rest of the fight as only half my casts will actually go through.

I've done everything, restarting all computer/router/modem hardware, checking firmware, uninstalling addons, clearing cache/interface/WTF. Only two possibilities left are 1) they didn't run enough interwebs to our apartment building, though this doesn't explain why this is a new problem, or 2) a new bottleneck between my ISP (Telus in Calgary) and the Chicago datacenter (Ruin: Bloodhoof).

Running a traceroute now, when there's no problem, there's an nicely low number of hops. Only 6 until it finds att.net, 10 until it goes full "request timed out" (ie, server reached). No cogentco hops. Highest ping 77ms.

Will update later when things get crappy.

[Araxom]

Please do!

[Justignoreme]

Slightly off-topic, but I work at a company who has an office next to Congentco's downtown Chicago office. They once offered us the office but we turned it down.

OT: If you find the slowdown I'm not sure what you can really do to correct it. It's not exactly in your hands. Is there a way to...override or get around a server on the way to Blizzard's?

I don't think it's possible at the customer end. And I've run traceroutes to all the battlegroup IPs listed by blizz for NA, they *all* go through cogentco. I am under the impression it's a cable internet thing since only cable internet users have been having this issue, specifically with certain ISPs and its definitely related to volume, since slowdowns are always in peak hours. My ISP pretends the issue isn't there, I even offered traceroute data. :/
mebbe maintenance this week fixed it though. Im 32/32 right now and usually this time of day Im 70-80

[Frostshockk]

Sorry for the long response time, but I have run 3 different trace routes at different hours of the day, the most recent done <5 minutes to this post. One done yesterday afternoon, and another at night, 9-10 EST. The first one had 2-3 significant hops, one was ~300 MS and the other was ~175 MS around the 11-13 spots. This is my result for the most recent one.

1 <1 ms 4 ms <1 ms Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 11 ms 7 ms 7 ms 72.71.243.1
3 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms 64.222.166.160
4 17 ms 13 ms 14 ms pool-64-222-213-132.port.east.myfairpoint.net [64.222.213.132]
5 13 ms 15 ms 15 ms xe-1-2-0.mpr4.bos2.us.above.net [64.125.71.169]
6 19 ms 35 ms 16 ms xe-1-0-0.mpr3.bos2.us.above.net [64.125.25.65]
7 33 ms 21 ms 22 ms xe-5-3-0.cr1.lga5.us.above.net [64.125.24.110]
8 26 ms 25 ms 26 ms xe-0-0-0.cr2.lga5.us.above.net [64.125.29.42]
9 23 ms 25 ms 23 ms xe-1-0-1.er2.lga5.us.above.net [64.125.26.166]
10 22 ms 21 ms 25 ms 192.205.36.105
11 49 ms 49 ms 50 ms cr1.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.86.6]
12 53 ms 51 ms 50 ms cr2.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.1.2]
13 46 ms 179 ms 99 ms gar3.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.132.213]
14 47 ms 44 ms 47 ms 12.122.251.50
15 49 ms 49 ms 49 ms 63.240.130.210

[Frostshockk]

Also, sorry for double post this just popped into my head, I am playing WoW right now, Horde Illidan if that matters. 126/56 MS right now. When I first logged in, I was at ~350/140 MS. It has gone from 50/50, normal MS, and spiked between the beginning MS.

[Rowlga]

Starting to get less responsive, but the trace is the same as earlier:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.254
2 7 ms 33 ms 7 ms [*.*.*.*]
3 36 ms 36 ms 36 ms chcgildtgr00.bb.telus.com [154.11.11.30]
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 77 ms 77 ms 77 ms 192.205.37.177
6 80 ms 74 ms * cr2.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.84.94]
7 77 ms 77 ms 91 ms gar3.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.132.213]
8 73 ms 77 ms 72 ms 12.122.251.50
9 79 ms 80 ms 79 ms 63.240.130.214
10 * * * Request timed out.

As for the cogentco theory, if it's causing trouble for others it's not what's causing my specific problem. In fact, my traces to the other datacenters I don't play on ALL go through cogentco, the Chicago servers are the only ones that don't for me.

This trace isn't any worse than it was earlier, but still, the game's responsiveness is deteriorating. Is there any way to narrow down where the problem might be given that traceroutes aren't really doing it?

It's interesting that I've seen a couple people over the past month posting about Chicago servers though. Bloodhoof, Illidan, & Medivh have come up.

[Frostshockk]

1 2 ms <1 ms 3 ms Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms xx.xx.xxx.xx
3 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms 64.222.166.160
4 11 ms 12 ms 13 ms pool-64-222-213-132.port.east.myfairpoint.net [64.222.213.132]
5 15 ms 14 ms 14 ms xe-1-2-0.mpr4.bos2.us.above.net [64.125.71.169]
6 16 ms 17 ms 16 ms xe-1-0-0.mpr3.bos2.us.above.net [64.125.25.65]
7 23 ms 27 ms 26 ms xe-5-3-0.cr1.lga5.us.above.net [64.125.24.110]
8 35 ms 32 ms 24 ms xe-4-3-0.cr2.lga5.us.above.net [64.125.22.170]
9 29 ms 30 ms 29 ms xe-1-0-1.er2.lga5.us.above.net [64.125.26.166]
10 34 ms 34 ms 32 ms 192.205.36.105
11 48 ms 48 ms 48 ms cr1.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.86.6]
12 50 ms 50 ms 52 ms cr2.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.1.2]
13 65 ms 144 ms 147 ms gar3.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.132.213]
14 47 ms 50 ms 49 ms 12.122.251.50
15 46 ms 46 ms 44 ms 63.240.130.210

at 150 ms in game right now

[Araxom]

Frost, your traces look fine. I've found that there are other similiar reports, however as far as I can see the issue does not lie on Blizzard's side. I want to give you a more straightforward answer, but that's as direct as I can be at the moment. You may want to contact the ISP directly and see if they have any further information they can provide as there appears to be others who are indeed experiencing the issue.

Thanks for hanging in there! Let me know if you do have any other specific questions, I'll be happy to answer as best I can!

/Araxom

[Frostshockk]

Hmm, okay, thanks Araxom. Last thing, for now :P, I am directly connected to my router, through a long ethernet cord, I mean long like 100 feet. My router is in the basement, the cord runs up a set of stairs, through my kitchen, up another set of stairs, into my room behind some bureaus finally reaching my computer. The cord is against the wall all the way up. Could the actual cord be a problem? For example, the doors it goes through, 2, closing on it damaging the cord or something?

[Araxom]

I doubt it. Any cord of mine that got crimped just wouldn't pass a signal at all. So in my understanding, it's either functional, or it's not. :/