As some of you may have already notice or know, Cluckyx and I are having some major lag problems on EfU that no one else seems to be experiencing. I can get up to a good two minutes behind everyone else.

Though! This only happens at certain times. We get really bad in GMT evenings (starting from about 7pm), when the server is pretty much packed. And then we can get none at all during GMT Mornings and early afternoons (anything before about 5pm), also when server only holds about 10 odd players.

This lag only seems to effect NWN and a couple of other programmes. Web browsers and loading videos seems to be fine.

Is anyone else experiencing problems as bad as this, or does anyone have any ideas on how to fix it?

I did here that lag was generally getting bad all round, is that right?

We are with the virgin network, which may have something to do with it.

Hmm, I'm with Virgin and my connection is fine.

Have to tried a basic modem reset? Unplugging and turning everything off for 10 minutes?

If that doesn't work, ring Virgin and give them a hard time until they agree to do something about it.

[Edit]: Get some spyware scanners. Adware and Spybot are the ones I highly recommend. You may have some nasty things eating up your connection.

I'm with Emruyk. After everything I've heard about your problems, I'm convinced it's either spyware or your ISP.

Send them a letter like this:

Dear Cretins,

I have been an NTL customer since 9th July 2001, when I signed up for your 3-in-one deal for cable TV, cable modem and telephone.

During this three month period I have encountered an inadequacy of service which I had not previously considered possible, as well as ignorance and stupidity of monolithic proportions. Please allow me to provide specific details, so that you can either pursue your professional prerogative, and seek to rectify these difficulties - or more likely (I suspect) so that you have some entertaining reading material as you while away the working day smoking B&H and drinking vendor-coffee on the bog in your office.

My initial installation was cancelled without warning or notice, resulting in my spending an entire Saturday sitting on my fat arse waiting for your technician to arrive. When he did not arrive at all, I spent a further 57 minutes listening to your infuriating hold music, and the even more annoying Scottish robot woman telling me to look at your helpful website… how?

I alleviated the boredom to some small extent by playing with my testicles for a few minutes - an activity at which you are no doubt both familiar and highly adept. The re-scheduled installation then took place some two weeks later, although the technician did forget to bring a number of vital tools - such as a drill-bit, and his cerebrum.

Two weeks later and my cable modem had still not arrived. After several further telephone calls (actually 15 telephone calls over 4 weeks) my modem arrived … a total of six weeks after I had requested it, and begun to pay for it. I estimate that the downtime of your internet servers is roughly 35%… these are usually the hours between 6pm and midnight, Monday to Friday, and most of the useful periods over the weekend. I am still waiting for my telephone connection. I have made 9 telephone calls on my mobile to your no-help line this week, and have been unhelpfully transferred to a variety of disinterested individuals, who are it seems also highly skilled bollocks jugglers.

I have been informed that:

* A telephone is available (and someone will call me back) * That no telephone is available (and someone will call me back) * That I will transferred to someone who knows whether or not a telephone line is available (and then been cut off) * That I will be transferred to someone who knows whether or not a telephone line is available (and then been re-directed to an answer machine informing me that your office is closed) * That I will be transferred to someone who knows whether or not a telephone line is available (and then been redirected to the irritating Scottish robot woman.. and several other variations on this theme.)

Doubtless you are no-longer reading this letter, as you have at least a thousand other dissatisfied customers to ignore, and also another one of those crucially important testicle moments to attend to. Frankly I don't care, as it's far more satisfying as a customer to voice my frustrations in print that to shout them as your unending hold music. Forgive me, therefore, if I continue:-

I though BT were shit, and that they had attained the holy piss-pot of god-awful customer relations, that no-one, anywhere, ever, could be more disinterested, less helpful or more obstructive to delivering service to their customers. That's why I chose NTL, and because, well, there isn't anyone else is there?

How surprised I therefore was, when I discovered to my considerable dissatisfaction and disappointment what a useless shower of bastards you truly are. You are a sputum-filled pieces of distended rectum - incompetents of the highest order. British Telecom - wankers though they are - shine like brilliant beacons of success, in the filthy puss filled mire of your seemingly limitless inadequacy.

Suffice to say that I have now given up on my futile and foolhardy quest to receive any kind of service from you. I suggest that you do likewise, and cease any potential future attempts to extort payment from me from the services which you have so far pointedly and catastrophically failed to deliver - any such activity will be greeted initially with hilarity and disbelief - although these feelings will quickly be replaced by derision, and even perhaps a small measure of bemused rage.

I enclose two small deposits, selected with great care from my cats litter tray, as an expression of my utter and complete contempt for both you, and your pointless company. I sincerely hope that they have not become desiccated during transit - they were satisfyingly moist at the time of posting, and I would feel considerable disappointment if you did not experience both their rich aroma and delicate texture.

Consider them the very embodiment of my feelings towards NTL, and it's worthless employees. Have a nice day - may it be the last in your miserable short life, you irritatingly incompetent and infuriatingly unhelpful bunch of twats.

Yours psychotically,

XXXX

<3 for PlayerCharacter's post.

We've tried the turning on and off thing.

And its highly unlikely to be spyware because its effected both pc's and we both own spybot and adeware

I lolling at PlayerCharacter's post. Pure genius.

Playercharacter, I hereby salute you.

... Righto, then.

I've been experiencing minor amounts of "lag" that no one else seems to be getting lately, too. I strongly suspect that it is due to the wireless router, for some obscure reason. Though, given that your problem appears to occur at certain times... I have no idea.

I suggest following through with PlayerCharacter's initial plan.

If its a wireless router then you will have to scew with the configurations till it works fine, or maybe move the PC to a different location. This happened to me last year, the change in either weather, or comcast being completely imcompetant made it so that my second PC didn't receive internect connection because of a disruption in the waves or something. I still had connection between computers (as I'm assuming you have) but no internet connection to speak of. I suggest manually setting everything up if you already haven't, and double check the numbers. Also don't listen to your router if it says you have "no internet connection", test it out yourself, mine has been telling me this constantly for a year and a half now and I do have it :D .

I am curious as to where the server is colocated and which major carriers are also colocated in the same facility.

If the NWN server is colocated in a facility that does not have direct access to a transatlantic link. It would be sad if it had to go through Asia to just reach the UK.

Of course that would mean everyone in Europe would be screwed and that does not seem to be the case.

Does this happen on other NWN servers as well? Possibly you need to reinstall NWN in order to clear it up.

Telecoms prefer selling big ticket items to large companies. In a previous life I sold a T3 connection, US-Japan-India, for about $250k per month. Ain't no consumer product gonna compare to that. Of course our office had a crappy local T1 service which sucked big time.

Sounds to me like you are getting slow internet connectivity at these peak times, no? Websites, NWN, everything is slow. Or did I misunderstand that.

If so, I'd wager it has nothing to do with NWN or our server, or it's location.

Try this, at several times during the day do a series of three speed tests.

http://www.speedtest.net/

Do three in the morning, three at lunch, and three at peak time when your lag is the worst. Write these down, this is your evidence that your connection is bad.

Next step is to start fussing with Virgin. You're clearly on a node with too much traffic going through it and this needs to change before your connection will ever get better. This means calling them, writing them, and generally harassing them with your evidence until they supply the service that you are paying for. Barring that, you need to find a new internet provider. Pronto.

I'd like to think dealing with the company won't be as bad as PC's horror letter... but you never know. However, these companies are all the same in one regard. They want your money. They will do what they have to in order to keep it.

Complain, make noise, threaten to cancel service. You'll get results.

EDIT: Reading comprehension seems to have evaded me tonight. Blah. Ignore this.

Check your computer thoroughly for spyware/adware. Make sure it's not doing a virus scan or spyware scan at these times. My computer, fast as it is, slows to a crawl when the daily virus scan kicks in. Also, check your task manager to see what programs are running and taking up the most system resources. Ctrl+Shift+Esc will bring this up. Sort the process list by CPU or Memory and see what it is that's slowing things down, if anything.

This game makes a -lot- of calls to the harddrive too, so if anything else is calling for information from the hard drive, you will see the game slow down. You mainly see this from antivirus scans. It could also be other programs too though.

I'd suggest just getting a new ISP. Some ISP's offer great deals for switching customers, if you metnion how shitty the other one was.

Not to mention it avoids teh hassle, and will get you up and running in alot less time

Have either of you tried running Tracert (traceroute) and looking at the data to see where the problem is occurring?

in command prompt try: tracert www.google.com

it should give time based results on each "hop" of the network journey. See what it gives. If neither of you can interpret the results, someone here can. It might show whether it's a certain section of the line (i.e. isp overloaded for instance) or at the start (bad home network hardware), etc etc.

I noticed alot of comments on spyware etc, but no suggestions of actual network tests other than speedtest.

On a side note: If you are setting up wireless networks at home, try and scan with a laptop to see what channels nearby networks operate on. If you chose a channel that is as far away from the others as possible, numerically, you will suffer from less interference.

AFAIK, 1, 6 and 11 don't interfere with each other. If your neighbors are on 1 and 3, for instance, use 10 or 11 and so on.

I doubt it is networking, but run some net tests from command prompt and see what you get.

Also in the UK if you download alot (i.e. 50 gigs a month or so) you get shitlisted to a bad set of IP ranges where you get low priority on the network infrastructure.

I hate you people for giving 10 times as much of a damn when teh internetz girl part of the duo asks for help.

By process of elimination:

*It's not a computer problem because it's happening on 2 PC's that share no common data.

*It's not a router or wireless problem because we are getting the same problem through a USB Speedtouch 330 modem, exactly the same result.

*It's not a firewall problem.

*It appears that anything coming through port 80 (Interwebs port) is passing unhindered. But Anything else is getting throttled. This is including my bitTorrent port and anything over steam.

That's cause your not as pretty :P

Cluck. Most if the intenet browsing, is basically just text data and a few pictures, so its usually pretty hard to notice a slowdown.

But it really does sound like your isp is treating you like shit. I would suggest moving. In my experience, hassling customer service, unless you do it in person, where they can actually help right then and there, it rarely works. More likely they will be "Please calm down, We will send someone to help you soon" *you wait for 3 weeks and no one comes*

Yeah. not really fun. Usually ISP's will give you some kind of deal, if you tell them you are swapping because the other company sucks. they will try to reel you in with a "special offer" like a free month, or half price for x number of months before you go to full price. Either way, A deal is a deal.

videos load fine online. anything from youtube clips to full films.

Just run some network tests.

Guesstimating gets you nowhere.

Well. It appears that there is something spreading across the net that appears to be the answer to out problems.

It's not good news. This post was made on the 28th of November

Some dude of the official EVE forum Being having serious high latencies in EVE for the past few days. however my broadband speeds were good.

I got in touch with my ISP Virgin Media and explained the problem. What i heard was shocking and I will be interested to see if anyone else on Virgin ADSL has been effected.

Basically Virgin have introduced what they call a 'Developer Prioritising System' and programs that are not set for high priorities by developer will come down the line really slow to make way for more important traffic.

Known programmes so far that are being effected badly by vurgins new brainwave are EVE and the new version of Ventrilo.

Virgin say that they have only introduced it recently and it is only active on ADSL. They also told me that it was upto the developers of certain programmes to set their applications priorities as high to avoid being throttled by this new system.

It fits with what has happened over the last week or two. And is actually stunningly frustrating. So it appears that until me and phoenix can wrestle free of this shitty shitty ISP

Leave virgin now, I beg you!

If they can do that and keep their customors, then other ISP's will start doing that. And then ill have to go back to playing single player.... :(

Actually, If i read that right, all you need to do is Ctrl+alt+delete, and set the process to high priority.

Try that, but if not, switch!

This is what net neutrality is about, and the result of it failing.

Cruzel Actually, If i read that right, all you need to do is Ctrl+alt+delete, and set the process to high priority.

Try that, but if not, switch!

The priority will be set by virgin, using CtrlAltDel will only set the priority high for CPU and RAM usage.

lovethesuit This is what net neutrality is about, and the result of it failing.

Indeed. This all down to what software developers slip them the most money.

This

Sucks

Hard

Hmm, if this starts happening to me I will be majorly pissed.

Think about switching ISPs?

As I said, Switch asap. If they dont notice a big decline in sales we are all so screwed.

On a side note, downloading the internet to your hard drives for personal consumption will get you shitlisted and put on a low priority range of IPs. I highly suggest people carefully watch their bandwidth usage.

we are looking at switching now. espcially for the new year.

Any suggestions of companies who don't suck?

Im current with Bt broadband and they generally do a really good job

the lag...

has stopped

!

Wcsherry, one step more towards 10,000 posts.

I was expressing excitement that my fellow gamers Cluckyx and AstralPhoenix can play again. But since you had to be rude about my low content posts, I'll flesh this one out with some detail.

I'm coming for your post count Howland. Watch your back.

20 posts a day or bust.

Locked, stop spamming the forums.