Latency Shoots up in instances

[Moriroken]

Hi All,

I play from South Africa connecting to the EU servers. My latency is generally pretty non-impressive (around 700ms in general). About a month ago I added the TcpAckFrequency value to my registry, which improved my pings dramatically (running around 400-450 now regularly).

Recently, however, either as a result of the above change or probably totally unrelated, I've been getting latency spikes as soon as I enter a dungeon. Well, maybe "spikes" is not quite right - it's normally a case of the pings climbing steadily until they reach around 6,000-8,000, then I DC.

When I log back on (which happens pretty quickly, I might add), my pings just carry on climbing, starting from around 12,000. The worst I've had them was 18,000. I can't even type a message in party chat to my quite obviously peeved pug-mates telling them my problem, let along actually leave the party so they can get someone to replace me.

Eventually I'll disconnect again, and I'll stay off for a while, giving them time to kick me ... seriously, most of the time, that's the only way I can leave. When I leave the dungeon, the pings return to normal again after about 5 minutes.

So, the question is, WTF is going on here. If I do a ping /t to a mainstream website (www.google.com for example), the are consistantly in the 200-220ms range, all the time. Just before entering the dungeon, my wow pings are 400, and 5 mins after I leave, they're back there again, while I'm in the dungeon, they are sky-high.

Could the TcpAckFrequency change be causing this, or is there some other problem I could have a look at?

Thanks all in advance.

General Information
CPU : Intel Pentium4 3.2
RAM : 4gb DDR-800
Graphics Card Geforce 9600GT
Power Supply Huntkey 400w
Operating System : Windows XP
Resolution : 1280x1024
Network Card : Realtek RTL8139 PCI

[Cilraaz]

The TcpAckFrequency change would not cause this. I would suggest doing a traceroute back to your server when the issue occurs.

• Press Windows + R to open the Run box
• Type cmd and press enter
• In the black box that pops up, type tracert eu.logon.battle.net > C:\tracert.txt and press enter

This will create a file in the root of your C: drive with connection information. Copy and paste that information here and we can troubleshoot a bit more. Make sure you do this when you notice the problem. You can even do it while still connected to WoW.

[Skyfiah]

I recently had some latency problems, nothing as bad as yours but I installed:
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...atencyFix.html

That improved my latency by a whole lot, I no longer have lag spikes. Could be worth a try before you delve any deeper into system settings?

It has an FAQ on the page that tells you how it works, but improved my latency to 35-45ms from around 150ms+.

[Moriroken]

Thanks for the response Calraaz, I will definitely do that. Problem is that my general connection has gone for a real big bowl of jelly. Tuesday night was bad all night, not just in instances, so I didn't think a tracert would have given me anything meaningful at that time - was down for most of today and all of yesterday.

This may actually be the route cause of my problem. It's (obviously) back up now, and general speed (outside WoW) seems a lot better already.

Skyfiah, all the Leatrix script does is add the TcpAckFrequency entry to the registry, and yeah, I received massive improvements when I did that, to the point that I was very happy overall - the problem was only sometimes in instances, which appears to have been more of a deep-seated issue (ie, with my ISP) that I thought.

Thanks again both of you for the input, I'll post more as and when I still have any problems.

[m4xc4v413r4]

The TcpAckFrequency change would not cause this. I would suggest doing a traceroute back to your server when the issue occurs.

• Press Windows + R to open the Run box
• Type cmd and press enter
• In the black box that pops up, type tracert eu.logon.battle.net > C:\tracert.txt and press enter

This will create a file in the root of your C: drive with connection information. Copy and paste that information here and we can troubleshoot a bit more. Make sure you do this when you notice the problem. You can even do it while still connected to WoW.

Isn't that trace route going to the login server? his problem is probably on the instance server since he only gets the latency problems in there.... anyway, doing a tracert on that will probably be a problem since we don't know the IP/name

[vesseblah]

Isn't that trace route going to the login server? his problem is probably on the instance server since he only gets the latency problems in there.... anyway, doing a tracert on that will probably be a problem since we don't know the IP/name

You can fish out the real IP with netstat for the actual server where you're connected in while the game is running, but it's bit more trickier. Doing traceroute will show local problems which are more than likely the reason for crappy connection.

[nwo]

www.speedtest.net and www.pingtest.net

They should have a server nearby where you live, just make sure you pick the closest one for the most accurate results.

I was having the same issues lately, and I found out that my upload would literally slow down to a crawl (0.01mbs) and my ping would shoot way up in the 300-500 range (on pingtest.net) and I would get a lot of packet loss ~50-100 if I recall correctly. Now I know 300-500 ping isn't bad at all for WoW since the server is so far away, but when you test it with a server that's fairly close to where you live, then that's a problem.

[Resa]

Mori, any chance you installed a new Antivirus program around the time your latency went crazy in instances?

This is a symptom we've seen before with an Antivirus having issues with allowing the game access.