High latency/Packet loss (World of Warcraft players only!)

[Aaron]

Hi, this is just for anyone else here who plays world of warcraft, as I know there's quite a few here at IDNet.

Have you been getting any higher than usual ping (from normal 40-60ms in-game to 100-200ms), or packet loss going on since Wednesday last week? It used to start happening in the evenings but now it can happen in the afternoon, in world zones, 5man instances, and 25man raids. This isn't to be confused with the high raid latency that's been plaguing game servers since the 2nd wing of ICC opened 4 weeks ago, as this seems to be only affecting me.

I have already given some information to IDNet support with my traceroutes/pathpings/pinggraphs etc, and it would probably help them further if anyone else could submit it too. I thought this problem would go away but it's been a week now and decided to do something about it

http://aaron.www.idnet.com/pinggraph1.png
http://aaron.www.idnet.com/traceroutes_pathpings.txt

The pinggraph is pinging one of the IPs from ffm-b10-link.telia.net as game servers don't return ping responses, so I opted to choose the one before it shown in a traceroute. And the spikes that started occurring halfway is when I started to get noticeable delays in-game.

[zappaDPJ]

Hi Aaron, I rarely get latency under 100ms on a WoW realm. Normally it sits between 100 and 200ms. My ping to local destinations however is usually 20-30ms so I'm guessing there's a routing issue somewhere.

That said there has been a problem with Blizzard's network (Telia) recently which is causing a lot of players high latency and disconnects. They have now acknowledged this on their login screen.

I obviously can't say if this is your problem but it's something to keep an eye on

[Aaron]

Yeah hope so, and I also use leatrix latency fix (http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info13581-LeatrixLatencyFix.html) so my in-game ping looks a lot more accurate as a result of the registry change, hence it goes to 30-40ms on a quiet time. Doesn't do enough to deal with bad routing though :p

[PuncH]

Also, see this from AAISP's status page. A lot of 20CN lines are suffering at the moment, so if you're on 20CN that could be it. Not sure what IDNet are doing about it, but AAISP are increasing capacity at considerable expense.

"In spite of clear indications that we are not the bottle-neck on 20CN in the evenings, we are increasing capacity even more to BT to give us more headroom and make absolutely sure.

This is expensive (more expensive than getting a new member of staff), but the quality of the service is important to us and we want to be quite sure that we are not the cause of the reported slow speeds. We suspect BT issues, but it will help if we can prove that to BT by having more headroom on our lines. Then we can get BT to improve it's network.

This may take a couple of days to complete, so thank you for your patience.

Note: We say clear indications we are not the bottle-neck... Yesterday evening there were some reports of slow speed on 20CN lines, but at the same time a customer was averaging more than 7M on a 7.15M line over 10 minutes on a single TCP connection. He uses the same connection our end and the same LNS and so on, so no reason in our network other customers would be slowing down, even though we could see that the links to BT at our end were very busy around that time. "

[Aaron]

I'm not exactly hopeful, I'm on 20CN (if that's what Max is on) and I'm not seeing a degradation of service elsewhere other than when playing WoW, and at the same time getting delays on movement/abilities when others aren't, really finding it hard to pinpoint what's causing it though if no other idnetters are reporting the same issue