West Coast Lag Issues

[Mesanna]

We are still looking into this but I would like to ask a few more questions please.

1. Has the lag let up any at all since it started?
2. Have you contacted your ISP regarding the lag?
3. What time of the day are you seeing the most lag?
4. Would you describe your lag as consistent or spiked?
5. Are you living on the east coast playing west coast?

The number of people posting their trace routes is very much appreciated but its not giving us the whole picture I am afraid. For now can I just get a count if at all possible of the number of people experiencing this problem.

Mesanna

 

[Specialshoes]

We are still looking into this but I would like to ask a few more questions please.

1. Has the lag let up any at all since it started?
2. Have you contacted your ISP regarding the lag?
3. What time of the day are you seeing the most lag?
4. Would you describe your lag as consistent or spiked?
5. Are you living on the east coast playing west coast?

The number of people posting their trace routes is very much appreciated but its not giving us the whole picture I am afraid. For now can I just get a count if at all possible of the number of people experiencing this problem.

Mesanna

1. No it hasn't
2. I have contacted them and bugged them almost as much as I have been a pest here about it.
3. The lag starts about 7-7:30 MST. (Waaaaay beyond regular prime time lag.)
4. Lag is pretty consistent
5. Living in Montana playing pacific (not really a coast up here)

If I remember right this happened last year around the time the snow was put in and ended with the snow going away. So I just role played having to trudge through snow.

 

[Basara]

1. no
2. no, but I do know that they are a part (but not all) of the problem on my end, as they are in the process of transferring services over from another company to roadrunner (who bought out my old provider in my state last year and have been doing transition work).
3. Lag in the evenings beyond the time one would expect from traffic or scheduled maintenance, worse than during the day.
4. Low amounts of lag (not reflected in average trace route times- I SHOULD be running faster than my traces to the servers in their new LA location indicate), with random spikes of lag where I freeze for 30-120 seconds, about 3-6 times an hour.
5. quasi-midwesterner (southern Kentucky) playing Lake Austin. Depending on the local conditions, my traces go through Chicago or Nashville (sometimes Nashville to Atlanta, before turning west). Currently, I've got an odd bump where I'm hitting Kansas City then bouncing back to Chicago, probably from where they are rerouting my old ISP (headquartered in MO) into my new one for the transition.

Lag seems to be worse when Level 3 or Alter.net get involved with the routing.

 

[Goodmann]

1. Has the lag let up any at all since it started? Not during the peak hours
2. Have you contacted your ISP regarding the lag? Yes, nothing on there end!
3. What time of the day are you seeing the most lag? 5pm-11pm Pac time
4. Would you describe your lag as consistent or spiked? consistent
5. Are you living on the east coast playing west coast? no, however can play east coast servers with min lag during these peak hours and I live on the west coast!

 

[Doubleplay]

1. Yes. There have been a few (very few) days in the last months when lag is not an issue.

2. I have not contacted Comcast this time around. Last time this happened, they shined us on.

3 Lag begins about 5 PM pacific time. I go to bed before it returns to normal.

4. During times of lag, all pings are over 240 continuously. Dropped packets occur regularly during this time.

5. I live on the West Coast of California. Lag occurs to all shards except the Japanese ones. Siege is by far the worst. I play Sonoma from less than 100 miles from that area, but have packet loss on the alternet hop, usually one to three hops before the EA servers.

 

[yars]

ive got it weird, i dont lag at luna bank or in a crowd,i lag around my house or in the wilderness with nothing around me.

 

[Haddy G]

1. Has the lag let up any at all since it started?
2. Have you contacted your ISP regarding the lag?
3. What time of the day are you seeing the most lag?
4. Would you describe your lag as consistent or spiked?
5. Are you living on the east coast playing west coast?

1. Some days are better than others, but no the lag still is here. The issue started around 1 Jan for me, before that I never had lag problem like this one.
2. I have not contacted them. I will though if you think that would help. The problem is this lag only affects UO. So I suspected a servers or route issue.
3. Almost always in the evenings. It seems like during the day there is no issue as soon as 5:00 to Midnight everything goes to crap.
4. Consistent
5. I do play from the East Coast to Pacific, so I do expect a ping of around 90, that is normal for me. On the other hand, I have had 200 to 300 pings to East Coast shards and Pacific would be in the normal ping range. This doesn't happen all the time, but when it does the lag will be for the entire evening. Regardless of which servers are experiencing the lag it's always the Alter.net server that seems to be the issue.

 

[Perma Fried]

1. Has the lag let up any at all since it started? Not during the peak hours
2. Have you contacted your ISP regarding the lag? Yes, nothing on there end!
3. What time of the day are you seeing the most lag? 5pm-11pm Pac time
4. Would you describe your lag as consistent or spiked? consistent
5. Are you living on the east coast playing west coast? no, however can play east coast servers with min lag during these peak hours and I live on the west coast!

Ditto........

Running a trace route as soon as it hits ALTER.NET it doubles, triples or more my ping #

 

[Poo]

k

color me this.

i live in western canada.
ive allways played west coast servers cause they are usually half the ping.

last 6 months all east coast servers have been half the ping of all west coast servers.

so now i find i play east coast more.

it seems strange to me that i have to play servers on the other side of the continent to get a decent ping.

 

[Lady Storm]

Lag got so bad today my character was stuck in one spot for over 10 minutes.. and I never get stuck on napa! Atlantic yes Napa never. I'm So Cal. Lag has been weird for a few months, and I naver have lag on Oceania and I got it now.....
Yesterday got new wireless modem and new IP addy, Cable replaced the line to a thicker and better carrier. So its not cable... that I know of.

Now I do play alot of shards and the lowest ping is Origin highest is Oceania, europa, and Drac.

 

[TheGhostRaider]

Play on the west coast and the last start when ALTER.Net join Comcast.

Host Name IP Address Hop Ping Time
* Unknown Host * 184.66.4.1 1 10ms
ix-3-1-0-0.tcore1.00S-Seattle.as6453.net 64.86.123.13 4 14ms
* Unknown Host * 64.86.123.46 5 12ms
0.ae3.XL4.SEA1.ALTER.NET 152.63.106.245 6 10ms
0.so-0-3-0.XT2.LAX9.ALTER.NET 152.63.4.61 7 87ms
0.so-1-0/0.UR2.LAX11.web.wcom.net 157.130.204.26 8 109ms
* Unknown Host * 208.254.48.30 9 86ms
* Unknown Host * 65.245.224.33 10 87ms
* Unknown Host * 65.216.123.34 11 83ms

Noting that my Provider can do when the problem is on the State, because all of his link are fine. SO UO need to come down on Alter to give us a better backbone.

 

[Specialshoes]

Can't let this thread fall by the wayside.

I am very concerned that this issue will get pushed so far back that it is forgotten. And honestly what is the use of paying for a game I cant play.

 

[Conrad]

I, too, suffer from nightly lag-fests. The time is about the same as everyone else. Comcast. I get almost the exact same ping times as I did when I first started playing UO....on dial-up......from Alaska, even though I am in Seattle now.

I have to ask, Messana, where, physically, are the servers located? My sister used to live in West Hollywood and had a horrible connection to various servers outside that area(not UO). When trying to figure out what the problem was, we narrowed it down to TWO ALTER.NET routers located just outside of Los Angeles--ALL traffic northbound out of the Los Angeles basin was getting routed through these two FAULTY routers. We called both Earthlink (the ISP my sister was using) and Comcast (My ISP), and a week later it got better--they appeared to have taken those two routers offline as we were getting hops through different locations. This was almost 3 years ago that we had this problem and it lasted about 6 months before we called them (didn't know what the problem was). The tech at Earthlink that my sister spoke to admitted that the two routers were faulty and that they would try to get the owners to fix them. I guess what they did was simple shut them down and reroute.

I do NOT know who owns that hardware, but if the servers are located within the Los Angeles basin, traffic to them are likely to be going through the same bottleneck that exists northbound out of that area (there is a shortage of fiber leaving LA northbound), and it appears that these SAME two routers might be back online and jamming up what is always a bottleneck anyway. I suspect they were put back online to handle the increasing traffic that Netflix and such are inflicting on the already over-sold ISPs.

This is, of course, entirely moot if the servers are not located in the LA area.

 

[Haddy G]

Hard to play with this ping. *Goes and kicks the cat*

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                                      WinMTR statistics                                   |
|                       Host              -   %  | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
|                              READYSHARE -    0 |   21 |   21 |    2 |    2 |    5 |    2 |
|                              XXXXXXXXXX-    0 |   21 |   21 |   17 |   28 |   37 |   33 |
|te-7-2-ur01.charleston.sc.chrlstn.comcast.net -    0 |   21 |   21 |   12 |   16 |   31 |   17 |
|te-9-3-ar01.charleston.sc.chrlstn.comcast.net -    0 |   21 |   21 |   10 |   14 |   19 |   18 |
|ml-1-ar01.savannah.ga.savannah.comcast.net -    0 |   21 |   21 |   12 |   16 |   22 |   19 |
|te-0-3-0-10-ar02.southside.fl.jacksvil.comcast.net -    0 |   21 |   21 |   18 |   24 |   33 |   26 |
|te-1-2-0-5-cr01.miami.fl.ibone.comcast.net -    0 |   21 |   21 |   25 |   29 |   35 |   34 |
|pos-0-4-0-0-pe01.nota.fl.ibone.comcast.net -    0 |   21 |   21 |   28 |   30 |   36 |   29 |
|     Vlan514.icore2.MLN-Miami.as6453.net -    6 |   17 |   16 |   25 |   31 |   41 |   28 |
|          0.xe-7-3-0.BR1.MIA19.ALTER.NET -    0 |   21 |   21 |   24 |   32 |   73 |   27 |
|         0.xe-10-2-0.XL1.MIA19.ALTER.NET -    0 |   21 |   21 |   25 |   35 |   67 |   29 |
|           0.so-5-0-0.XT1.LAX7.ALTER.NET -    6 |   19 |   18 |  184 |  191 |  212 |  194 |
|         so-0-0-0.ur1.lax11.web.wcom.net -    6 |   17 |   16 |  187 |  193 |  197 |  191 |
|                           208.254.48.26 -    0 |   21 |   21 |  189 |  194 |  206 |  206 |
|                           65.245.224.33 -    6 |   19 |   18 |  186 |  192 |  212 |  193 |
|                           65.216.123.33 -    6 |   17 |   16 |  186 |  192 |  197 |  188 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
   WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

 

[Lady Storm]

Lag is getting worse... Had loged in 6 times to finally get totaly in the game... was pulling teeth to feed the fish the lag was so bad 1 minute per bottle of food till you could move again and deposit another in the tank.. Today is the 18th and its still bad no matter what account I use or computer. Log in page hangs for minutes on end... then the actions during play is soo slow had to walk away as I was getting fustrated.