ECN Capability - this might help some who are having problems with EA support, etc.

[Llewen]

A while ago I had a problem with EA's websites. I suddenly couldn't access their support, UO Game Codes, in fact I couldn't access anything on EA except the main page. It turned out that the problem was a Windows 7 network setting I had tweaked (this would also apply to Win 2008 and Vista).

How to check if you have this issue:

- Open up a command prompt as administrator (Google if you don't know how to do this)
- Enter the following, "netsh int tcp show global" (without the quotes)

You should see a list of network settings. One may read as follows, "ECN Capability : disabled". If that reads as "enabled" instead of "disabled" you will have the problem I described.

To turn it off enter the following into the command prompt window, "netsh int tcp set global ecncapability=disabled".

Now this is disabled by default, but if you happen to be a tweaker you may have, as I did, read that enabling this was a good thing, or maybe you have a tweaker in the family...

 

[Sevin0oo0]

Re: ECN Capability - this might help some who are having problems with EA support, et

does all that mean they have the wrong packet size configured? I know the optimum size varies with different providers and their service areas across the country, causing site connection problems. Packet set too large by 1 is enough to cause problems.

Unhappy people at the Bioware/EA forum too, discussing this and the company's failure to fix problems. Least we're not alone in getting crappy service.

Excellent post! Thanks for sharing

 

[Aurelius]

Re: ECN Capability - this might help some who are having problems with EA support, et

Good find.

Sadly since I'm running XP SP3 that's not the problem I'm hitting ( since that's specific to UOGamecodes I'm absolutely certain it's not a 'global' PC setting here), but it may help out a few folks so it's useful to know.

 

[Llewen]

Re: ECN Capability - this might help some who are having problems with EA support, et

does all that mean they have the wrong packet size configured? I know the optimum size varies with different providers and their service areas across the country, causing site connection problems. Packet set too large by 1 is enough to cause problems.

ECN stands for "explicit congestion notification". This is from SpeedGuide.net:

ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification, RFC 3168) is a mechanism that provides routers with an alternate method of communicating network congestion. It is aimed to decrease retransmissions. In essence, ECN assumes that the cause of any packet loss is router congestion. It allows routers experiencing congestion to mark packets and allow clients to automatically lower their transfer rate to prevent further packet loss. Traditionally, TCP/IP networks signal congestion by dropping packets. When ECN is successfully negotiated, an ECN-aware router may set a bit in the IP header (in the DiffServ field) instead of dropping a packet in order to signal congestion. The receiver echoes the congestion indication to the sender, which must react as though a packet drop were detected.

My guess is EA is using a router in their network that is incompatible with this protocol in some way. But even when it wasn't causing problems it seems to me that ECN actually increased latency for me. My guess is it is only very useful if you are typically having problems with dropped packets, which I wasn't. If you use a router it also needs to be ECN capable.