Dota 2 - Low PING to China

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Bashley

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I was looking at match played by Chinese teams for a spot at TI4.
Ping to their severs was at 55 - 75 ms. Look at the screen shoot, top right hand corner.

When I play on the SA sever, the ping is between 55 and 80 ms. But since late, has been terrible. Constant lag spikes, with over 200 ms ping.

Dota 2 low ping to China.jpg
 
That's because you were spectating. Try playing on a chinese server.
 
Interesting. But I'm not sure how the streaming and all works when you are spectating games. I would be interested in seeing the ping in a match of your own. You could join a new game on a Chinese server, but that might suck. What about creating a private lobby for yourself, fill the remaining slots with bots, select China as the server region, start the match and check it out in game.
 
I've also wondered how the whole spectating thing works when watching international dota 2 tournaments.

Sure, when you play a dota 2 game you select South Africa, but what happens when spectating those international games, do they magically route it via the SA server and somehow reduce the lag associated with the International Servers?

I've watched quite a few International games and lag does creep in on random occasions, which also affects the commentary..... all in all rather annoying.
 
While spectating games being played by friends I've noticed you are always at least two minutes behind the live action. My guess is they use a two minute buffer to try make the viewing process smooth, but there could be other things happening in that two minute window, including replicating the replay to a local server. Don't know what's really going on behind the scenes, just guessing.
 
Seriously said:
What has that got to do with ping. Please inform me as I feel dumbfounded!
Click to expand...

Well when you spectate you watch a delayed match so its probably proxied through our local servers. So watching as a spectator does not mean you have low pings to chinese servers. It means you have a low ping to the local South African server where you are watching the delayed match from.
 
Spectate servers =/= game servers. The game can be played in China but the spectate server you connected to is in SA. Since there is a delay on spectating, the spectate server can easily get and buffer the data to make it smooth for when you request it.

In other words, you just got lucky and got a spot on a local spectate server.
 
ghoti said:
Well when you spectate you watch a delayed match so its probably proxied through our local servers. So watching as a spectator does not mean you have low pings to chinese servers. It means you have a low ping to the local South African server where you are watching the delayed match from.
Click to expand...

That I understand which could explain it.
 
Bashley said:
When I play on the SA sever, the ping is between 55 and 80 ms. But since late, has been terrible. Constant lag spikes, with over 200 ms ping.
Click to expand...

Still don't know what this has to do with China...

As an aside, because light is so slow you'll have about 1ms latency for every 100km. You can't get around that.
 
Light travels at 300 000 km/sec, meaning 1ms latency is for every 300 km. But it's not just the speed of light that affects latency. Other factors such as routing play a much bigger role. If it was just speed of light, latency from Johannesburg to Beijing would be about 40ms. Latency from Cape Town to Johannesburg would be about 4-5ms. So light isn't that slow.
 
The delay in spectating is intentional. If it was "real time" it would cause massive cheating. A buddy could spectate you and give you real time information of the enemy. This won't be good for tournaments...
 
ghoti said:
Well when you spectate you watch a delayed match so its probably proxied through our local servers. So watching as a spectator does not mean you have low pings to chinese servers. It means you have a low ping to the local South African server where you are watching the delayed match from.
Click to expand...

Yes. This what I found out. Seems there were a lot of people streaming the TI4 qualifiers. So the did as you explained.

But now the commentators are constantly breaking up. I was happy to view the matches on 450 ms ping. It was solid.
 
-Misfit- said:
Light travels at 300 000 km/sec, meaning 1ms latency is for every 300 km. But it's not just the speed of light that affects latency. Other factors such as routing play a much bigger role. If it was just speed of light, latency from Johannesburg to Beijing would be about 40ms. Latency from Cape Town to Johannesburg would be about 4-5ms. So light isn't that slow.
Click to expand...

Actually for international connections, this is the weird thing and why I mentioned it.

Without routing your packets move at say 75% of the speed of light and latency involves the round-trip (X2) (and some loss on routing)..that's where the ~1ms/100km comes from.

So at 10'000km to UK or China, that is already 100ms - and it's not going to be a straight line or instant response. The bulk of the latency is due to the distance / light being slow. Then you must still add your ISP connection overhead.
 
I can't get around you calling light slow. It irks me.

At least there is room for improvement. Maybe one day when the whole world is covered in fiber optics we will have truly low ping to any location around the world.
 
Sorry but you have to lose all hope of improvement... those Chinese dudes click really fast... light is too slow for that ****. :D

But signals could be sent faster than light, I just don't think they'll spend the money on better gaming latency.
 
I don't think faster than light in anything is possible, at least not with current technology and understanding of physics.
 
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