Gaming severely affected by someone else browsing...

D

die_skim

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Hi guys and girls,

I recently got my ADSL line and immediately bumped up the line speed to 4Mb because I have 3 consoles and 2 PC's connected to my router at the same time sharing the same internet account. When I'm the only one using the line I get excellent latency to the SAIX gaming servers, usually around 50ms, but when my fiance uses her PC to download something from the web or even check e-mail it's like the entire bandwidth priority shifts to her surfing and e-mail and my latency shoots through the roof.

I would like to know, I am currently running on a normal shaped internet account, would moving to an UNSHAPED account solve the issue a bit?

Thanks!
 
Unshaped should solve the issue a bit, try buying some prepaid account (that has the Web Africa multi-realm ability). And test it. You might want to setup your router to give priority to the gaming ports as well.

Your fiance probably gets nice big joke emails that's the same as downloading, and unfortunately the priority on saix shaped is: ssl,http,mail,ftp,everything else... so you're pulling at the short end of the stick
 
Luckily she pulls at the end of a stick as well...but none of that now...

Anyways...my archaic router doesn't allow QoS prioritization, it would have been a nice fix I agree, but perhaps it would be better for me to simply move to the unshaped world and get it over with, at least gaming ports are apparently given the same priority....

Thanks for your comments!
 
Cheapest solution, and the solution us gamers have been using for years... yell "IM PLAYING!! STOP USING THE INTERNET!!"

Express yourself in such a way that the normal non-gamers in the household understand you. This works even better if you pay for the internet, as you can include threats.
 
lol! I'm not brave enough to take that stand with my fiance...I may not live to game again. I do like the threats part, but again, her threats always seem to hit home a lot more.
 
die_skim said:
lol! I'm not brave enough to take that stand with my fiance...I may not live to game again. I do like the threats part, but again, her threats always seem to hit home a lot more.
Click to expand...

what, that she won't pull that short stick anymore? :D
 
Unshaped will not solve the problem to an extent where it actually makes a difference.
What you can do is setup your computer as her proxy server, and then throttle her down to 2% of line capacity, and perhaps that will stop her from affecting you. If you give her more than 2% of line capacity, your latency will be useless.

EDIT - More detail : It's like this, email will send: Hey, give me the email; the mail server responds; Here it comes, and sends a massive 4096 size packet, her computer replies, ty, next, and wham, another massive 4096 size packet and on and on and on .. now, your line is being swamped with incoming big packets, and it's the incoming packets that are killing you, and you have no control over that. You can try to set her maximum packet size to say, 64k, that may have some effect.
 
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You struggle on a 4 meg line?

Damn even a stream video would not chow 400kbs. Get something like net limited and lost it on her pc, allow her pc to only download 100kbs max.
 
Thanks for all the replies people! I'm going to be investigating your suggestions and hopefully it should resolve my issue :)
 
I don't see how this is a shaping problem.

Generally lets say you start off with 400kbs, now your chick checks her email and surfs the net, HTf is she chowing all that speed is my question? Even if http and email is priority how is the email and internet chowing 400kbs?
 
The problem is how the browser uses your bandwidth. It doesn't have a constant stream of data. It has a few BIG spikes every few seconds.

One way I had to mitigate this, was to put a bandwidth limiting app on every PC. We had 3 at that point running off the same connection. I needed about 1/3rd of the bandwidth to play a decent game, so I just limited the other 2 pc's to a slower speed.

The pages still load fine, and for normal browsing you hardly notice the limit. The line therefore had less spikes in download requests, meaning the game gets a more consistent response from the game server.

A proper proxy server should be able to handle things better, but requires a bit more footwork.

---

EDIT: Just as a bit of an explantation.

You click a single page on Facebook. The browser opens 30-odd connections to various servers to pull down all the little pictures and text and random bull**** data. This can easily max out a 4Mbps line for a few seconds even. During this time the game doesn't get the data it was expecting for a fraction of a second, so it basically 'hangs'. The data for the game then comes through in a big bunch after all this Facebook data has processed and the game is suddenly up to date again. The game logic could handle this type of connection in various ways, but nothing good usually comes of it.

For a 400Kbps line, limit all the computers to 200Kbps, and everybody should still be happy. You can even turn this off when other people aren't busy, but when someone is playing games, giving up a few milliseconds on your email loads is worth not getting shot by a gamer ;)
 
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Or... another solution... use a firewall distro like Smoothwall which does QoS and use that to prioritize your ports on your side.
 
Shaped/Unshaped bandwidth makes no difference to the problem people!

You need to set up some form of bandwidth allocation/prioritization/QoS so she does not use the whole pipe while you game.

Linux/BSD can do this for you.
 
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Ive played dota (extremely sensitive to lag spikes) on a 4mb line at an internet cafe with about 15 people browsing facebook at the same time. I didnt spike.
 
cheapest sollution is to buy a stick. cover it with fake bling. get a fake "gril" and some gangsta clothes. watch alota rap videos(2 pc's and 3 consoles? surely you own dstv?) then refer to your fiance as biatch(no disrespect to you meneer) and wen she uses the internet. get up and raise the pimp stick and tell her that if she dont get off "somebody gonna get hurt real bad" simple sollution:cool::cool::cool:
 
w1z4rd said:
Ive played dota (extremely sensitive to lag spikes) on a 4mb line at an internet cafe with about 15 people browsing facebook at the same time. I didnt spike.
Click to expand...

Like already mentioned. If some QOS is set up, it's quite possible to do.

4Mbps simply split into 16 still gives you 250Kbps each on average. More than enough to join a DOTA game.
 
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