LATENCY!!!

Gordon_R said:
It's quiter at the moment, but definitely not fixed!

One of the ISP's has been routing some traffic via CINX-JINX, as you can see from the sudden jumps in the graphs:
http://stats.cinx.net.za/

I'm not a gamer, but I'm also waiting. Local latency gets added to international latency, so pings of 400ms to the UK, and 500ms to the US, don't make for pleasant browsing experiences...
Click to expand...

That wierd late morning dip seems to coincide with the 20 minutes of 100% packet losses on my log.

http://www.imagehost.co.za/share-8CAD_4CC010AB.html
 
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@ will and jeff:

now that we can talk i was wondering why your ISPs dont host any quake live servers? the only quake live servers in south africa are at quake.isgaming.co.za (which is in JHB and there are no cape town servers). cape town players pings are about 40ms while jhb players pings are 8 to 16ms which makes a big difference in such a fast fps game. i believe mweb still have quake 3 servers running including cape town ones (zero.mweb.co.za, karoo.mweb.co.za, kalahari.mweb.co.za), those servers are now redundant since quake 3 was replaced by quake live months ago. it would be really really really nice if we could get a couple of cape town live servers and be the ones with low pings for a change. please?
 
Surv0 said:
Derail: I tried getting into quake live - couldnt get used to the new FOV on my widescreen - messed everything up for me...
Click to expand...

ye, its **** on wide screen 1st gen LCD. thats why i still use a CRT for quake. but there are options for widescreen to prevent stretching or allow it. nvidia allows you to prevent stretching (with black bars) and quake has setting to support widescreen now. you can also just play in a window and use any custom width and height resolution. you can change your FOV too.
 
peTerp00n said:
@ will and jeff:

now that we can talk i was wondering why your ISPs dont host any quake live servers? the only quake live servers in south africa are at quake.isgaming.co.za (which is in JHB and there are no cape town servers). cape town players pings are about 40ms while jhb players pings are 8 to 16ms which makes a big difference in such a fast fps game. i believe mweb still have quake 3 servers running including cape town ones (zero.mweb.co.za, karoo.mweb.co.za, kalahari.mweb.co.za), those servers are now redundant since quake 3 was replaced by quake live months ago. it would be really really really nice if we could get a couple of cape town live servers and be the ones with low pings for a change. please?
Click to expand...

I'll see what I can arrange for you guys :)
We'll get the proposal through to our Games Admin to possibly have this setup. Keep an eye on our blog, Facebook and forums for any updates. Alternatively, I'll drop you a PM once we have them live.
 
Hi Everyone

Apparently something was done at the Rondebosch exchange - is there any change in anyone's experience today?
 
nope... my local ping is still ****ed. although its usually around 200ms so maybe this is an improvement. doesnt help me though.

Pinging mweb.co.za [196.2.63.110] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 196.2.63.110: bytes=32 time=101ms TTL=123
Reply from 196.2.63.110: bytes=32 time=130ms TTL=123
Reply from 196.2.63.110: bytes=32 time=121ms TTL=123
Reply from 196.2.63.110: bytes=32 time=106ms TTL=123

Ping statistics for 196.2.63.110:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 101ms, Maximum = 130ms, Average = 114ms
 
I'll check when I get home tonight. I'm praying it has been fixed, my trigger finger is getting seriously ITCHY!!!
 
@peTerp00n I just spoke to our gamesmaster as well. Our Q3 servers are still used by the guys who play at competition level, but he will definitely look at the possibility of bringing a live server online in the near future.
 
thanks will.

that is interesting. i had no idea that the Q3 servers were still being used. the QL servers are much more popular than i have ever seen the Q3 servers so i just assumed Q3 was completely dead. i know recently rage held a competition in Q3 as well as QL so obviously some of the top players practiced Q3 but i didnt think anyone was actually using those servers anymore. i will check them out tonight. high ping and all (no noticeable improvement today).
 
In the most recent response I received it seems that it is now being suggested once more that this is not a central issue, but isolated problems on various DSLAMS and that we must provide even more evidence.

I'm sure you all share my opinion on this response :D Therefore it's time that we take our evidence gathering up a gear so let's do the following;

  1. Arm yourself with the ping graphing utility of your choice. I found a nice free and easy to use one here: http://www.colasoft.com/download/products/download_ping_tool.php
  2. Use telkom.co.za as a common local destination to ping
  3. Graph as much of your day as you can on a clean connection (that means stop your torrents for now)
  4. Send the graphs to the following address which I have set up for this : adsllatency at gmail.com
  5. Include your ADSL line number in the mail so that we can map these exactly onto the correct exchange and DSLAM.
 
No change in latency on my side, other than a lull at 1pm (as per teRRRier's graph).

Will: That Telkom excuse is BS, as I'm sure you know. I get exactly the same latency, and I can't believe we're all on the same DSLAM...

I will do that download. (Has to be on my other PC, won't run on Win 98 ;-)

Update: Just installed the program, but it looks different from teRRRier's one.

Will: How many hours should I let this run? Still have to try saving as graph, etc.

Update: I've changed my options to 5000ms polling interval. This allows the graph to cover several minutes of ping data. I don't see many other options for the chart.

Will: telkom.co.za is 11 hops from CT. That makes it very easy to 'blame' other factors...

P.S. Until I post my chart, I can state that my latency is pretty much steady at 160ms.
 
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I've been testing with various accounts in World of Warcraft. MWEB/Web Africa has horrible pings for the last couple of days (last week MWEB worked perfectly during office hours while Web Africa was screwed, and Web Africa worked perfectly after hours while MWEB was screwed). Today I got myself an Afrihost account once more to test on IS bandwidth, and it has a stable ping of an average sitting just above 600ms. Very playable.

I stopped measuring latency in ping responses due to the way some ISP's can shape (or lets say, not shape) ICMP requests to various servers. So even though there is no packet loss and an apparent brilliant ping time response, it's not indicative of the online experience when playing online games or using Skype.

I'm still not convinced it's a Telkom problem. It might be a Telkom problem on MWEB and Web Africa's IPC links which might just converge in Rondebosch causing all this, but I'll be getting a SAIX account from TelkomInternet soon to test on that as well. I've been at it for almost 2 weeks now and I can tell you it's NOT a last mile issue (I'm in the Western Cape, about 50km's outside of Cape Town)
 
Will@MWEB said:
In the most recent response I received it seems that it is now being suggested once more that this is not a central issue, but isolated problems on various DSLAMS and that we must provide even more evidence.

I'm sure you all share my opinion on this response :D Therefore it's time that we take our evidence gathering up a gear so let's do the following;

  1. Arm yourself with the ping graphing utility of your choice. I found a nice free and easy to use one here: http://www.colasoft.com/download/products/download_ping_tool.php
  2. Use telkom.co.za as a common local destination to ping
  3. Graph as much of your day as you can on a clean connection (that means stop your torrents for now)
  4. Send the graphs to the following address which I have set up for this : adsllatency at gmail.com
  5. Include your ADSL line number in the mail so that we can map these exactly onto the correct exchange and DSLAM.
Click to expand...

SIGH. anyway, i tried the free ping graph tool and i cant get it to save a complete graph (it only saves the portion that is displayed). i cant find a way to zoom out to see a whole day. could we not just form a kind of petition with each person submitting a ping and/or tracert sample (using cmd), and a brief description of the problem, and our area and phone codes. we know we all have the same problem and it seems like they just need the complaint in numbers to prove that it is a real problem. we can include some graphs where available, but i think its going to be hard to get a lot of graphs. but we can get a lot of ping tests with descriptions like "my ping is ****ing high from about 8am untill 12am and it has been this way for 1.5 months, since the 10meg upgrades. ive been downgraded to 4meg and its not helping."
 
AcidRaZor said:
I've been testing with various accounts in World of Warcraft. MWEB/Web Africa has horrible pings for the last couple of days (last week MWEB worked perfectly during office hours while Web Africa was screwed, and Web Africa worked perfectly after hours while MWEB was screwed). Today I got myself an Afrihost account once more to test on IS bandwidth, and it has a stable ping of an average sitting just above 600ms. Very playable.

I stopped measuring latency in ping responses due to the way some ISP's can shape (or lets say, not shape) ICMP requests to various servers. So even though there is no packet loss and an apparent brilliant ping time response, it's not indicative of the online experience when playing online games or using Skype.

I'm still not convinced it's a Telkom problem. It might be a Telkom problem on MWEB and Web Africa's IPC links which might just converge in Rondebosch causing all this, but I'll be getting a SAIX account from TelkomInternet soon to test on that as well. I've been at it for almost 2 weeks now and I can tell you it's NOT a last mile issue (I'm in the Western Cape, about 50km's outside of Cape Town)
Click to expand...

AcidRazor thanks for your input.

In your case you are correct There are specific issues with WoW latency which are being discussed at length in the gaming feedback thread (We made another change this morning to try and resolve this). however there is very definitely a Telkom latency issue in the Southern Suburbs area which is ISP independent and has been very well proved by everyone in this thread and both myself and Jeff from WA are working with telkom to try and get this issue resolved.
 
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