[Snap] Lag spikes and disconnections, Suggestion from a Gamer

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › [Snap] Lag spikes and disconnections, Suggestion from a Gamer

Cululu

30 posts

Geek

#60972 6-May-2010 16:10

Today, lags and disconnections in WOW again, I guess it's very very sad for NZ gamers.
It seems Snap has recently narrowed their oversea traffic bandwidth, especially to servers in the US, it's fine if u are soloing or in a small group, but it's a nightmare when the data flow goes larger than 0.5mbps/s when u in a large group or raiding.
I had to use a SSH tunnel on an australia server to make the connection useable for gaming. This shouldn't be the solution.

To Snap people there, I am pretty sure many gamers in NZ are like me who wants to buy quality service, the service standard should be set higher or at least give a choice for us to choose, for example, a higher price but better oversea traffic pack that suits us gamers, interested?

As a matter of fact, many NZ gamers are already paying extra $$ to some tunnel service providers every month (and their service is poor and unstable). If our own ISP can provide this kind of (or better) service, many will likely to pay our ISPs instead and people will be happy.

Ragnor

8223 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#327446 6-May-2010 16:47

Seems to have been a few few problems with Snap's international capacity recently.

There are some other threads about it, Ralph from Snap has asked people having specific problems peak time problems to email him the details in the past so he can review the issue, might be worth trying.

See here:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=90&topicid=59864&page_no=1#318173

Cululu

30 posts

Geek

#327791 7-May-2010 17:25

I did log a ticket on official Snap website. I also emailed their tech team.
And just before I try to email/pm people on geekzone, I read this "Please use our forums to discuss topics that may benefit the entire community". And I think this topic/discuss may benefit the community, thus I'd like to post stuff here, so more people can see if they are suffering from the same problem and know what I find out for them, this also helps snap to lighten the work load of their help desk cause less people asking. (Usually problems that attracts public attention gets fixed faster as well:))

Here are some speedtest/pingtest, winMTR results, along with what I find out, hopefully some geek from Snap or some super geek from here can figure out the problem.

All tests are done from Christchurch Central which I believe it is very close to Snap headquarters.
===============================================================
First test is to snap's own test server, very good national speed and bandwidth, but as shown on the picture, it's wierld that I am getting routed through wellington.

================================================
Let's test some oversea traffic.
Next 2 tests have their targets set to www.dreamhost.com in LA
pretty decent result in the morning,

but in only 15 min time the speed dropped 0.5mb/s.
This is in the morning which usually gets best result in the day.

=================================================
Now in the afternoon around 5pm NZ, national traffic remains super. but oversea traffic has gone down hills..
This however is also not the worst time of the day, the worst is around 8:00-9:00PM in the evening when you can acctually have download speed slower than upload..

To Snap server:

To dreamhost.com in LA:

================================================

Here are 2 ping test, target set to ookla.com in LA, one in the morning, one in the afternoon.
Identical and very nice results, also nice jitter for that distance.

Morning:

Afternoon:

====================================================

Finally, some winMTR results, a windows version of the linux program "MTR", a combination of ping and tracert, let's see what I find out.

with target set to dreamhost.com which is the same we used in the speedtests:

next figure shows the result with target set to the World of Warcraft game server that I play on. It is loacted in LA as well, same place of dreamhost, but it gets routed very different, the traffic go through telstraclear nodes instead of gobal-gateway.net.nz.

below are some more tests done to different servers, they are all located in LA, and they went through telstraclear nodes:

I wonder why only dreamhost.com gets routed different, is it for showing better result on speedtest.net?

Ragnor

8223 posts

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#327815 7-May-2010 19:54

IP ranges "owned" by ISP's change over time, speedtest is just guesstimating the distance and doing a whois lookup on the owner.

That international performance of 1 to 1.5Mbit/s off peak and 0.6 Mbit's on peak on a 6 Mbit/s + adsl sync speed is pretty poor imo.

As you can see from your tests Snap uses both Telecom (global gateway) and Telstra (reach is also Telstra) as their international transit providers (it's standard for ISP's to use a couple of different providers for international transit) which is why routes to different servers vary.

Telstra has been having some problems with international traffic recently in the last week so this may explain some of your performance problems

All the packet loss in your mtr results is with upstream providers. You should log the issue with Snap and they should log the issue with the providers.

What speed do you get downloading from something hosted on dreamhost during peak time (ie: going via Telecom/Global Gateway) vs downloading from something going via Telstraclear/Reach vs Telstraclear/Alternet?

Sounds like using a ssh tunnel to a server that gets routed via Telecom/Global Gateway for playing wow is going to be the best work around until Telstaclear/Reach and Telstraclear/Alternet issues are resolved.

Ragnor

8223 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#327820 7-May-2010 20:08

Here's some background on the transit providers providers involved.

Reach is a joint venture owned by Telstra and PCCW, it owns rights/access/shares in a number of submarine fibre optic cables and satelites that server the asia pacific region.

Global Gateway is Telecom, well probably technically part of Telecom wholesale (since operational separation). It providers domestic and international transit for internet traffic. Telecom own 50% of the southern cross cable.

Alternet is part of Verizon who own 10% of the southern cross cable.

Cululu

30 posts

Geek

#327839 7-May-2010 21:34

Looks like it's more than what we guessed.

More statistics incoming..
The following tests are done during peak time, around 20:50pm NZ time with less than 5min between each other..

After some try, this tunnel server I found is the only useable one for gaming, the server is located in LA. There are some nodes in this route that returns high latency but it's working at a useable manner and it went through telstraclear.

Now to dreamwork.com, went through telecom. and wooah 600-1k ms, broken

and the last test tells me it's not a telecom problem, or at least not just a telecom problem, the target server is also located in LA, and the connection went through telstraclr which is broken as well. Note all 3 tests are done in 5min of each other.

Cululu

30 posts

Geek

#328044 8-May-2010 21:01

Everything seems fixed today.