Printable View
Man, I'm tired of massive pack loss playing tribes. I adjust my setting regularly with small improves to PL but lose out on ping. Some servers I have no PL and others (that have good competition on them) I can never rid myself of PL.
Any suggestions on improvements, tweaks, etc.
[AK]NeverRetreat
Hard "problem" to solve.
Your increased latency is *mostly due to the nature of cable modem access being shared media. Consider your cable modem line one big shared hub segment connected to other large shared hub segments. With the large array of crap people do on their home networks like running badly configured Windows NT servers, IPX, and god forbid...Appletalk (both sometimes required for some older LAN games), your cable modem segment is flooded with incredible quantities of "overhead", broadcast-based traffic. I've run sniffer traces on MY cable network and have seen all sorts of WINS broadcasts, master browser elections, DHCP queries, you name it.
You probably won't understand the level of how rediculous this is but I've even seen terrible numbers of RIP (old routing protocol - and no, Zorro, wasn't RIPv2 either) sending routing updates to my nodes. People often think the number of people watching cable television affects your bandwidth and while somewhat relevant but not entirely true, this is not so as t.v. and Internet traffic occur at different frequencies on the wire. The contradiction is in considering simple electronic engineering facts - the wire can either have positively charged electrons flowing across it or not. It's on or off. t.v. pushes electrons, cable modems push electrons - but t.v. signals are much less prominent and take up less bandwidth. (regular cable, can't speak for 'digital cable' subscribers - don't have it to check) The way t.v. can be on and your network connection being active with NO disruptions in your t.v. service (no skips, jumps, frame desequencing, etc) is based on the frequencies. Technically, t.v. traffic and Internet traffic don't "see" each other and aren't bothered by eachother. Coax, while you might think it's old technology, can carry a helluva lot of bandwidth. Keep in mind, super-duper WAN links like OC3s (A T1 is 1.554Mbps - an OC3 is 155.52 Mbps) are carried by Coax to the demark location.
So, all that is good - but how do you speed things up? Well, you can SLIGHTLY affect your performance by doing some packet filtering on your end. This can be done with a software solution (software firewall) or a hardware solution (router, actual firewall, etc). This is only mildly effective because the traffic still has to traverse your segement to get denied at the final destination. This filtering creates a lesser burden on your NIC and CPU as it doesn't have to process packets not destined for your node. It speeds things up a bit, but not much. The optimal solution would be to filter the traffic closest to the source so it doesn't cross the backbone and interfere with other traffic. Unfortunately, you can't do that. Your ISP probably won't do it either and will just say, "We don't support people's home networks".
What that really means is as long as someone's paper MCSE certification and preconception that they "know" what they're doing doesn't break anything...you're **** outta luck in getting their excessive broadcast traffic cut off. I used to call in all sorts of complaints trying to get particular nodes, protocols, and ports shut down - never got any help...and I'd call several times a day, every day, for months.
With cable modems, junk traffic and slow responses during peak usage are just part of the game. Believe me, I feel your pain.
Regards,
The Wraith
*generalization of 'mostly' as this cannot be accurately determined without an actual sniffer trace of your segment for validation.
------------------
Moderator - UBB Code Hacking
InfoPop Corporation - Ultimate Bulletin Board
http://www.ultimatebb.com
"Breaker of UBB code, worldwide..."
[This message has been edited by The Wraith (edited 10-02-2000).]
Bonus points for the person who can point out an error in my post above. Zorro excluded http://www.augustknights.com/ubb/smile.gif
Regards,
The Wraith
------------------
Moderator - UBB Code Hacking
InfoPop Corporation - Ultimate Bulletin Board
http://www.ultimatebb.com
"Breaker of UBB code, worldwide..."
So that I understand this correctly, the best solution I currently have is to insist that anyone within my area (5 to 10 mile radius) be denied access to cable modem service. Those who are current subscribers must forfeit their cable service and after all this is accomplished I should have decent service again.
After I finish building my new computer, I can see a need to further understand the networking benefits, and the products that promote quality service.
Thanks Wrath,
[AK]NeverRetreat
That was an interesting read. I was always curious about cable modems and their latency issues.