Help, I'm lagging!

[Davairus]

Lag - in the sense that you can't get a normal speed connection tot he mud. Reasons for lag will be numerous, and while I can't list them all, I'll try to nail a few for you here.

To check your lag, run the program CMD (type it on your start menu's run prompt), and use the command "ping abandonedrealms.com". You should see a range anywhere between 71 ms and 300 ms. Here's how it breaks down:

<50ms = zero lag. And I hate you.
<150ms = noticeable lag, occasional "spikes"
<250ms = significant lag, but viable
(most people fall within this region, or are at the boundary)
<350ms = lag is a major issue for you, but you'll be able to level and train ok
500ms+/Timeout = intolerable

I've been on all of them.. we all have.

A) Server lag

Sometimes the mud is lagging, because there's a bottleneck out in cyberspace somewhere. We can't help this. The good news is everyone suffers. The bad news is the only way to tell is to ask other people if they're lagged.

B) Client lag

I'll just list a few main one's, and what you can do about them..

Location- Do you live in singapore, australia, sweden, the uk? If so, you'll be lagging behind the americans a bit. Mudders have been proving for 5-6 years that this isn't a disastrous situation for pk'ing, people with faraway location have led cabals, gotten Immed, even made triple digit pk records. There's nothing you can do about lag because of being far away from the server, but the game is designed in a way that it doesnt matter too much, especially with experience at the game. We've always been cautious for our foreign player's sake.

Dial-ups- Are you playing on a dial-up connection? If so, you'd better be in the States. .. otherwise you're going to get too laggy to compete. People play this mud on dial-up AOL, and do more than adequate with just that, even against the cable users.

Plenty of guys on AR are from other countries and/or using dial-ups, so much fun to be had still.

Bandwidth- Are you experienced lag far too horrendous to play? If none of the above, and it isnt server lag, what you're probably experiencing is excessive bandwidth consumption.

1) If you are on a university network, you'll find the network gets too busy for gaming on, due to other people on the network using it all up. The solution is to just wait it out, play later, off-peak hours. Sometimes the inverse is true, the university will wait until off-peak hours to do its maintenance. So you will actually be forced to quit for a while.

2) Sometimes your ISP lags. Another thing to just wait out. If your area doesn't offer many choices for high-speed internet, it can be possible that the company is overselling their pipe to make extra money. This means, like with a university network, just play off-peak hours. Or phone the IP incase of problems.

* something to keep in mind about high-speed ISP lag is you can refresh your ISP by power cycling the modem. To do this:

- turn off the computer
- turn off and UNPLUG the modem
- turn off routers

- turn on the modem, wait for it to make a connection
- turn on the router
-turn on the computer

Make sure you do things in that order.

3) Disk space. You can lag by being extremely low on disk space. Make sure you have at least 5 Gb.

4) Run a malware scan.

5) Multiple firewalls conflict with each other. Make sure you only have ONE firewall active. This is actually more effective than multiple firewalls.

6) IF you are on a local network, your network bandwith can be consumed by your room-mate giving it away to movie leechers via torrent/p2p uploading. This is one of the biggest woe for gamers, luckily router manufacturers are catching on. Explore your router's options. For example, LinkSys router settings (access by navigating to http://192.168.1.1) often have an "applications and gaming" tab. In this tab, you can control the "Quality of Service". You would set manual "Incoming Rate Limit" to something like 1 M for each ethernet port, instead of leaving it set at auto. This is more than enough for gaming, and makes sure that none of your ports are consuming all bandwith with uploads. If your router doesnt have this option, what you can do is mess with the p2p client - have the room-mate move downloaded files out of its download folder.

3) Wireless networking. This is still a fairly new technology, and still way too ahead of its time. If you can, plug the cables back in.


...Anything to contribute? Just reply and I'll do an edit.

[MrCarb]

If you are using a wireless connection and you experience regular lag spikes (ever 30 seconds or so) then try disabling 'wireless zero configuration' under 'services' in the control panel. Keep in mind that you'll need this service running to connect to the internet, but you can disable it once connected. The problem is it insists on regularly checking for a better connection and can totaly freeze you up whilst doing so. It got me killed alot before I figured out what was going on.