Actrix, DNS server setup not the best for gaming? Plus other ISP suggestions

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › Actrix, DNS server setup not the best for gaming? Plus other ISP suggestions

P1n3apqlExpr3ss

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#86953 15-Jul-2011 19:47

Been with these guys for a while now, and I always wondered why I would get 140 ping to On3 BC2 servers when im on the north shore, while a friend pretty much across the road, although on another cabinet and ISP (telstra i think) gets under 100.

Been talking to them recently, customer service is as good as what others say it is just btw, wondering why my pings are high and when doing this ([url]http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/203.96.57.145[/url]) it says im located in wellington. Which turns out where their DNS servers are and all traffic has to pass through these at one stage.

Being on the north shore this isnt useful seeing data has to go to welly then back to auckland for the servers. Adversely affecting pings? While looking up Orcons dns servers they appear to be in Auckland which would result in lesser pings?

For comparisons sake I currently get better ping test results to wellington then auckland, ms based by 7-10ms.

Discuss the DNS server situation. Do other ISPs such as orcon and xnet have multiple DNS servers or do they operate out of a single location? Is it best to choose a ISP with DNS servers closer to you?

Also showed parents Orcons new VOIP thing launching soon and am kinda on the lookout for a new ISP. Open to suggestions.

Btw. Telecoms address check thing says im in a adsl2+ cabinet enabled area, but Orcon wont show me orcon+ plans, and vodafone says im not in their red network when apparently i should be? House isnt that old, was built early 00's if that makes a difference.

tl;dr
DNS server location affect on ping and other ISP suggestions.

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#493828 15-Jul-2011 20:22

umm...

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BlakJak

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#493831 15-Jul-2011 20:26

Most ISP's locate their infrastructure in their Datacentre.
Most Datacentres will be in the same city as their corporate offices.
Actrix is based in Wellington. What did you expect?

That said, whatismyipaddress.com's output for your IP is using geolocation data which tends to be imperfect at anything other than Country level (and then sometimes at that). So it is unlikely to have any impact on your gaming experience.

If the latency between you and your DNS servers is abnormally high, that'll adversely affect you across the board. So ping the DNS servers of your ISP, and then ping somewhere else, and compare.
The baseline latency Auckland-Wellington is somewhere near 12ms, so yes, if you're talking to a server in Auckland you will probably see latency in that order when your ping is originating from Actrix in Wellington. And yes, across the ADSL underlying network, your data is tromboning (travelling across Telecoms network to the Actrix ADSL handover, presumably in Wellington) before then heading back to Auckland over IP.

The truth is that the reason that the majority of ISP's have their core environments located in Auckland is that the majority of the connectivity is located there. Distance is the biggest issue behind Latency, but you need to reset your troubleshooting approach a bit, it appears.

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P1n3apqlExpr3ss

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#493834 15-Jul-2011 20:41

I was not aware of all this DNS stuff before signing up with them.

For comparison sake I ping actrix with 50ms and orcon with 62, although data is obviously useless seeing it has to go through wellington anyway.

How would I go about troubleshooting it further?

BlakJak

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#493838 15-Jul-2011 20:54

Well for starters, Baseline Latency on ADSL is around 50ms, so that suggests you're not likely to be hindered on Layer 1/2 path between your home and Actrix's ADSL edge.

The Actrix to Orcon ping time being 62 accurately represents [ADSL baseline] + [Latency from WLG to AKL].

So it depends on what you value. There's a bunch of content providers based in Wellington - Trademe (etc) are one and NZCity (etc) are another, just off the top of my head. No doubt you'll get better speeds from them than you will from Auckland based stuff.

As Mauricio has posted several times, Geekzone's server is located in Auckland because the majority of his key audience are connected through Auckland. Despite him living in Wellington.

In the end if your ping time back to Auckland is of that much concern to you, you should select an ISP in Auckland. That means most of the others excluding Snap, InspireNet and Actrix...

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P1n3apqlExpr3ss

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#493844 15-Jul-2011 21:03

So in other words I would expect just a 12ms decrease in ping while gaming? As I said pings are 140 to On3 which I believe are auckland based. Pings in server browser state just 63ms compared to ingame at 140~. Would turning interleaving off help? To what extent?

Ragnor

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#493845 15-Jul-2011 21:04

DNS servers will not effect your gaming latency, DNS servers are just like a phone book for domain names used to look up the ip address of a domain name so your computer can connect.

You go to www.geekzone.co.nz in your browser, the brower will ask your computer/OS (eg: Windows, Mac, Linux etc) hey what's the number (ip address) for this domain, your computer will check if it recently already looked this up if so it will get it from it's cache - if not then it will query your ISP dns servers.

Here's roughly how data gets from your to a gaming server.

Your Line > Exchange/Cabinet > Backhaul > Handover link > ISP Network > ISP domestic/international transit > Gaming server

If you're on the North Shore and Actrix only does handover in Wellington yes your data needs to travel a bit further on the backhaul but it should not make a significant difference in latency, maybe 10-20ms.

BlakJak

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#493848 15-Jul-2011 21:08

Can you post a traceroute to the On3 server which you're pinging? 140ms sounds a bit like the US West Coast.

If your in-game pings greatly exceed pings whilst not playing, it could suggest congestion on the link during gameplay that doesn't exist otherwise. If your line sync rate for ADSL is decent, tough to say where it is without further data....

There's a tool called mtr - 'matts traceroute' - and a Windows variant (WinMTR) (which i've not yet successfully used under Windows 7 - I think the windows port isn't developed anymore). A commandline tool that's similar is 'pathping' available on a Windows 7 box (from memory only works for 9 hops?)

Give one of those a try. If you have more than one machine, test from one whilst connected to the gameserver on the other. See if you can see at which point the latency figures suddenly change.

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Ragnor

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#493851 15-Jul-2011 21:09

P1n3apqlExpr3ss: So in other words I would expect just a 12ms decrease in ping while gaming? As I said pings are 140 to On3 which I believe are auckland based. Pings in server browser state just 63ms compared to ingame at 140~. Would turning interleaving off help? To what extent?

Yes, if you have interleaving on this will be the major cause of the higher latency.

Can you run a tracert to geekzone.co.nz and post the results? Windows Key + r > cmd > tracert www.geekzone.co.nz

P1n3apqlExpr3ss

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#493856 15-Jul-2011 21:15

CMD pinging the server IP gives 63ms. Throughput of packets type thing causing higher ping? That or interleaving? I know ping increases with traffic size, from memory i believe anyway

image: https://cdn.geekzone.co.nz/imagessubs/blogfd5e7b07ead255baa5cd8ea9b4fb58fb.jpg

BlakJak

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#493857 15-Jul-2011 21:19

Ragnor:
P1n3apqlExpr3ss: So in other words I would expect just a 12ms decrease in ping while gaming? As I said pings are 140 to On3 which I believe are auckland based. Pings in server browser state just 63ms compared to ingame at 140~. Would turning interleaving off help? To what extent?

Yes, if you have interleaving on this will be the major cause of the higher latency.

Can you run a tracert to geekzone.co.nz and post the results? Windows Key + r > cmd > tracert www.geekzone.co.nz

This is slightly misleading.
The baseline 50ms latency of ADSL is due to interleaving.
Interleaving is a 'buffer' that helps provide error correction and ensure packets are delivered in the correct order. This 'buffer' introduces much of that 50ms of latency.
Turning off Interleaving will indeed reduce your ping times.
It will also increase the possibility of errors on your ADSL line..
Eliminate the other issues before you go down the interleaving path, in my opinion.

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BlakJak

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#493858 15-Jul-2011 21:22

P1n3apqlExpr3ss: CMD pinging the server IP gives 63ms. Throughput of packets type thing causing higher ping? That or interleaving? I know ping increases with traffic size, from memory i believe anyway

image: https://cdn.geekzone.co.nz/imagessubs/blogfd5e7b07ead255baa5cd8ea9b4fb58fb.jpg

Re this, the important thing to note is that your latency on the first hop is low, as you would expect, and the second hop (your ISP) gains you most of your base latency (circa 50ms).
By the time you reach the destination (geekzone) your latency is 64ms - so you're only dealing with 14ms of network latency end to end.

The traceroute doesn't suggest there's any congestion on the path, though it does show that Datacom (who host Geekzone) are backhauling the data from Wellington to Auckland... you're entering their network at the WIX (Wellington).

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P1n3apqlExpr3ss

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#493864 15-Jul-2011 21:36

BlakJak:
Eliminate the other issues before you go down the interleaving path, in my opinion.

What issues are these?

BlakJak

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#493865 15-Jul-2011 21:42

P1n3apqlExpr3ss:
BlakJak:
Eliminate the other issues before you go down the interleaving path, in my opinion.

What issues are these?

Still looking for the traceroute to the gaming server, and for you to establish whether there's any packet loss during game play that doesn't exist when the game is not running.

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Ragnor

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#493868 15-Jul-2011 21:46

lets see an tracert to ON3, their Left 4 Dead 2 server ip address is: 203.97.27.199
http://www.on3network.co.nz/serverlist.php

Post results of a tracert to a server ip address ^

Here's what it looks like at home for me (Telecom in Auckland) with interleaving off

tracert 203.97.27.199

Tracing route to gfep1.clear.net.nz [203.97.27.199] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 1 ms 1 ms 2 ms 192.168.1.1
3 23 ms 19 ms 13 ms 219-89-52-1.dialup.xtra.co.nz [219.89.52.1]
4 * 54 ms 21 ms mdr-fid-dom.akcr10.global-gateway.net.nz [202.50.238.50]
5 20 ms 10 ms 10 ms ae4-20.akcr10.global-gateway.net.nz [202.50.238.49]
6 13 ms 12 ms 10 ms ge-2-0-0-906.ie2.telstraclear.net [203.98.18.65]
7 11 ms 11 ms 12 ms front2-clix.clear.net.nz [203.167.243.213]
8 11 ms 12 ms 11 ms gfep1.clear.net.nz [203.97.27.199]

I consider getting interleaving turned off mandatory for gamers, unless you have a really bad quality line it's way better to have it off than on. Call your ISP to get it turned off, same again then back on again if you have line stability problems.

Nothing to lose imo, way better gaming ping to gain!

sbiddle

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#493872 15-Jul-2011 21:51

P1n3apqlExpr3ss:Open to suggestions.

Btw. Telecoms address check thing says im in a adsl2+ cabinet enabled area, but Orcon wont show me orcon+ plans, and vodafone says im not in their red network when apparently i should be? House isnt that old, was built early 00's if that makes a difference.

If you are connected to a cabinet you can't connect to the Orcon+ or Vodafone Red network. ULL companies only co-site gear in exchanges, not cabinets, so only provide very limited coverage.

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