ping/packet loss !? gaming

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › ping/packet loss !? gaming

mikejay

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#42727 9-Oct-2009 12:23

hi im a noob when it comes to these issues so stay with me

Im trying to get some decent online play on the PS3 but having lots of lag issues

My download and uploads are good and ping is good for local servers.

But when it tests for packet loss its 35% which it indicates is pretty bad and probably why gaming is having problems

Is this a problem i can fix or has it got to do with ISP telecom?

cheers

Ragnor

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#262707 9-Oct-2009 12:37

If you are on Big Time or Go Large this is a known problem at the moment, a side effect of the traffic management rules.

If you're on a normal plan what's the address of the server you're trying to play on?

mikejay

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#262798 9-Oct-2009 15:49

im on explorer

I tested it on pingtest.net from a auckland server dsl nz

and its coming back with 35% packet loss

LennonNZ

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#262815 9-Oct-2009 16:17

Can you please ping 60.234.76.50 from your machine directly and see if you have any packet loss..
I have contacted the guys at ookla (pingtest.net) asking about this problem..

Ragnor

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#262845 9-Oct-2009 17:18

I wouldn't consider pingtest.net reliable because it depends who hosts the Auckland server, it's not going to be the same host as you're playing on with your ps3.

LennonNZ

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#262850 9-Oct-2009 17:46

The Auckland serfer is run by me.. and the server does have plenty of BW available. You shouldn't get 35% packet loss to the machine at all from anywhere in NZ (or international) but there are a few issues with the flash app which I've seen which I've reported back to them which reports false packet loss at the moment for some reason.

mikejay

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#263088 10-Oct-2009 17:42

Hi
I have similar results testing a tauranga server

Lennon Is this done using the command prompt? If so packets sent were 4 and packets recieved were 4
0% loss

Does this mean theres a problem with pingtest.net?

Ragnor the server is in the US, 2ksports, Do game servers have to be in australasia to get any decent gaming?

cheers

Lenovo

Shop now for Lenovo laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

LennonNZ

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#263095 10-Oct-2009 18:09

The way pingtest works I have been told is it runs a java program for some of it (the packet loss test) it downloads as flash can only do TCP properly . So from Flash -> javascript -> java to do this lots of different issues they have getting this working 100%. Make sure you have the lastest java and flash and don't have javascript disabled and it _should_ run better.

Ilmarin

94 posts

Master Geek

#263254 11-Oct-2009 12:03

pingtest.net seems pretty pointless to me. To determine packetloss, it appears to open a TCP connection on port 5060 (a known SIP port... which is likely to be given high transmission priority since it's used for VoIP), but doesn't look like any SIP communication I can recall seeing... then it sends a bunch of small UDP packets (13 bytes of data each in my case), and the server responds on the TCP connection with the number of packets that it received. It then does a bunch of PING/PONG exchanges on the TCP connection to determine the average latency. Obviously all of those comms are done via Java.

Latency calculation using arbitrary TCP is certainly a lot better than what speedtest.net does with HTTP requests, but I fail to see how small UDP packets on a typical VoIP port are a good general indication of packetloss. For that matter, ICMP isn't necessarily a good indicator of packetloss either, although at least you're likely to be able to ping an actual game server. Ideally the PS3 platform should provide the ability to monitor packetloss through its networking layer, as that's the best place to do it, but I'm guessing it probably doesn't.