My ping on games is awesome, but my connection still sucks! why??

[duuuma]

I've got a wireless Netgear router with a linksys usb adapter. My normal connection works fine and my ping on games is great. However, on games, my connection skips in and out and gets interrupted often. My friend suspected it was b/c of lost packets from the wireless connection, but is there anyway to fix this?

also, my wireless connection is excellent/very strong

 

[Soybomb]

You shouldn't be loosing packets, wireless or not if the connection is half way decent. Do a traceroute or two and see where the packet loss is occuring, if any.

 

[Garion]

A normal traceroute can be difficult for diagnostics - I'd definitely recommend something like Ping Plotter.. It gives you a great view of the network between your PC and your destination to see what's going on. Find the first hop that's giving you packet loss or a lot of variance in your performance and that's your problem.

- G

 

[nightowl]

My guess would be the USB wireless adapter. Under normal circumstances the adapter will work fine and you will not notice any problems. When you put your system under load things will dramatically change due to the nature of USB and its high dependancy on the CPU. It sounds like that when you are playing games that the USB adapter cannot get adequate CPU time to operate in an accecpable manner.

 

[duuuma]

i'm playing jedi outcast, so it is a pretty cpu intensive game, but it's my connection that's getting disturbed. The game itself is running fine...i think?

how do you traceroute on winxp? I'm a network dummy sorry guys....

 

[duuuma]

Thanks for the tip. I tried out the program and it seems that I'm getting 100% packet loss on hop 8 but what does that mean?

Originally posted by: Garion
A normal traceroute can be difficult for diagnostics - I'd definitely recommend something like Ping Plotter.. It gives you a great view of the network between your PC and your destination to see what's going on. Find the first hop that's giving you packet loss or a lot of variance in your performance and that's your problem.

- G

 

[Garion]

How many hops do you get total? It's not unusual to see a hop where you have 100% packet loss at the end - That's typical of a machine that's behind a firewall or a NAT. It's when you start seeing packet loss or slow response times in the early or middle hops that you have a problem.

- G

 

[duuuma]

it's at hop 8 out of 14 hops total, so I guess I have a problem? What exactly are the hops?

Originally posted by: Garion
How many hops do you get total? It's not unusual to see a hop where you have 100% packet loss at the end - That's typical of a machine that's behind a firewall or a NAT. It's when you start seeing packet loss or slow response times in the early or middle hops that you have a problem.

- G

 

[Garion]

Hops are the individual routers that your data goes across on the way to the server. If it's waaaay in the middle, there's probably nothing you can do - It might not even belong to your ISP or his ISP, it might be a middle-tier transport provider. It's also possible that it's not reachable for a reason. As long as it's the *only* router that's giving packet loss, you should be alright. The real bad news is that when you see a router starting to drop packets and then the same level of dropped packets further on - That indicates a real problem with the link dropping your data, not just something local to that router stopping you from communicating wiht *it*.

When you do a "ping -t (remote IP)", does it show dropped packets if you let it run while playing and see the freezups? Are you sure this is network-related and that there isn't something going on with your local PC or the remote server?

- G

 

[duuuma]

Night Owl might've hit the bullseye. I tried using a Netgear PCI wireless adapter with my wireless PCMCIA card and Jedi Outcast stopped giving me those 'connection interrupted' messages constantly. All the problematic symptoms disappeared! I'm guessing the cpu utilization was causing my usb adapter to drop my connection constantly. Thanks for the help guys.

Originally posted by: nightowl
My guess would be the USB wireless adapter. Under normal circumstances the adapter will work fine and you will not notice any problems. When you put your system under load things will dramatically change due to the nature of USB and its high dependancy on the CPU. It sounds like that when you are playing games that the USB adapter cannot get adequate CPU time to operate in an accecpable manner.