WoW: High Latency

When I started replaying WoW in Aug, I generally averaged about 150-180 ms latency at home. I thought it was annoying but playable at 400-600ms when I was in Korea for 2 weeks at the end of August.

Sometime recently (since around the time of patch 2.3, possibly up to a week before it) my latency is all over the place (except good). I'm lucky if I get 180ms, usually its in the 200-300 and into the yellow at 400s. It's annoying and it is completely unpredictable.

I tried some latency tests online to various servers around the country and they generally come back as around 50 ms ping time. Does that mean it is not my connection, but perhaps congestion between myself and the WoW server? Something at the ISP (Brighthouse Cable in Orlando, FL, if that matters) where they are throttling game data?

Does anyone have any ideas to check out? I read some threads on the official forums (shudder) looking for help, but most of those are just people saying "Hey Blizzard, what did you break? My latency sucks now! Fix it!" and no word from any blues. Some others suggested that it was related to using a sound card/hardware drivers for sound (?) - that doesn't even begin to make sense to me.

I found this site that purports to help you track down source of high latency. I'm a little worried of just installing some unknown program that is going to run while I play - could contain a keylogger or something. Anyone have any experience or know of something similar but reputable?

Any help would be appreciated. Oh another thing that is weird is that my wife's computer right next to mine seems unaffected and/or possibly less affected that mine (not entirely scientific, I know, but that's the best anecdotal evidence I've got). Both computers use wireless NICs, though different models. I've updated my driver to the most current official one. One other difference is that her computer uses on-board sound, unlike mine - some credence to the weird theory on the official forums that this is somehow related to sound card hardware drivers?

I have somewhat the same issue from time to time. I can ping google at 40ms, yet have sporadic yellow/red latency in WoW. I personally think it's a mix of problems

Through my Time Warner cable modem, I'll lose 5% of my packets pinging to Google and anything over 2% is problematic. Also, my ping times can be quite high...last night I was in the 70-100ms ping range to Google with around an 8% loss rate. It played havoc on my performance in Kara until it calmed down.

I also think that packet shaping from a fiber carrier (possibly Level 3), which can delay the receipt of packets during higher traffic times, is a problem. MMO packets should be carried at a high priority, but I think they get crapped on from packet shapers from a traffic classification standpoint, delaying their receipt to/from Blizzard.

Your comment twigged me to the fact that I've been seeing the same thing, and that it's not just server overloading. I believe I may have figured it out.

Back about patch 1.1 or 1.2, suddeny WoW broke very badly on my machine at the time. The problem was that the NVidia chipset I was using did TCP checksum offloading in the network driver. WoW did NOT like this, and would almost immediately log me off shortly after starting. It took most of a day to stumble across the fix in the forums, to disable that feature in that chipset.

So, on a hunch, I just now went into my network properties, pulled up the device properties page on my network card, and disabled all the 'offload' settings. On my Marvell Yukon Ethernet chip, I had 'Large Send Offload" and "TCP/UDP Checksum Offload" options. After turning those off and relaunching, my ping dropped from 242ms to 65.

Try that and see what happens.

I have somewhat the same issue from time to time. I can ping google at 40ms, yet have sporadic yellow/red latency in WoW. I personally think it's a mix of problems

Through my Time Warner cable modem, I'll lose 5% of my packets pinging to Google and anything over 2% is problematic. Also, my ping times can be quite high...last night I was in the 70-100ms ping range to Google with around an 8% loss rate. It played havoc on my performance in Kara until it calmed down.

I also think that packet shaping from a fiber carrier (possibly Level 3), which can delay the receipt of packets during higher traffic times, is a problem. MMO packets should be carried at a high priority, but I think they get crapped on from packet shapers from a traffic classification standpoint, delaying their receipt to/from Blizzard.

A guildie just posted the following link to our forums. It contains a registry hack which claims to significantly reduce latency. I haven't tested yet, but will as soon as I get home.

I didn't even realize my ~200ms latency was a big deal. Obviously it is why I keep getting owned in random PvP encounters, those LPBs.

http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t17761-s...

ccranium wrote:

A guildie just posted the following link to our forums. It contains a registry hack which claims to significantly reduce latency. I haven't tested yet, but will as soon as I get home.

I didn't even realize my ~200ms latency was a big deal. Obviously it is why I keep getting owned in random PvP encounters, those LPBs.

http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t17761-s...

For those who don't want to hit the link, here's the suggestions:

To get low pings with 2 simple registry hacks do the following. You need to apply both registry changes to get the maximum effect.

1 - TcpAckFrequency - NOTE if you are running Windows Vista this setting may not have any effect - a hotfix is needed which i'm tracking down. This works fine under Windows XP

Type "regedit" in windows "run.." dialog to bring up registry menu

Then find:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\

There will be multiple NIC interfaces listed in there, find the one you use to connect to the internet, there will be several interfaces listed (they have long names like {7DBA6DCA-FFE8-4002-A28F-4D2B57AE8383}. Click each one, the right one will have lots of settings in it and you will see your machines IP address listed there somewhere. Right-click in the right hand pane and add a new DWORD value, name it TcpAckFrequency, then right click the entry and click Modify and assign a value of 1.

You can change it back to 2 (default) at a later stage if it affects your other TCP application performance. it tells windows how many TCP packets to wait before sending ACK. if the value is 1, windows will send ACK every time it receives a TCP package.

2 - TCPNoDelay
This one is pretty simple

Discussed here

Type "regedit" in windows "run.." dialog to bring up registry menu

Then find:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSMQ\Parameters

Right-click in the right hand pane and add a new DWORD value, name it TCPNoDelay, then right click the entry and click Modify and assign a value of 1.

Click Ok and close the registry editor, then reboot your PC.

I have found the performance to be at least as good as routing via a linux box, possibly better.

I'm bumping this thread because a couple of Goodjers tonight had good luck following these instructions.

If you're getting 200+ms ping times, there's a pretty good chance that reading this thread and following the directions will cut them in at least half. Between disabling all network offloading and turning off the Nagle algorithm, I went from 250ish ms routinely to 40-50, most of the time.

That registry hack has been officially made obsolete by Blizzard in the last patch as they disabled the Nagle algorithm that called for it in the first place.

Also, if you have Voice Chat tab enabled, even if just for listening, disable it. Just do it.

Interestingly, I did not have any success following the advice in this thread. My latency meter *showed* a lower latency, but my in-game actions still delayed as if I had high latency. I reversed all the settings.

That registry hack has been officially made obsolete by Blizzard in the last patch as they disabled the Nagle algorithm that called for it in the first place.

I was under the impression that they disabled it on their servers, but not on the clients.

Khoram: that's a shame. What Ethernet chipset?

Some Linksys 802.11g wireless card. I know that I won't get as low a latency as if I were wired, but what pisses me off is that my wife's computer, also accessing via wireless, sitting 5 feet away from mine only shows about half the latency as mine.

In regards to wireless:

Try disabling frame bursting on the router and/or card. It's a feature thats only intermittently supported. Afterburner/Speed*whatever is even less supported. Both can cause problems.

Frame aggregation on the other hand - leave that on.

Also, try setting CTS/RTS (B/G) protection to Auto on both router and card. it may affect transfer speeds but it makes the connection more reliable in my experience, even if no B-devices are legitimately connected to the network.

I cant find any of those options. My wireless network card does advertise a speed booster I'd like to destroy to see if it helps the occasional 1700 ping I get. For some reason, relogging seems to fix whatever problem I have but its a pain.

I've tried to run Linksys's bundled garbageware too and it just doesn't actually run when I activate it.

card: Linksys USB network adapter model: WUSB54GSC
Router: some Belkin POS with really bad software.

OS: Vista 64bit

polypusher wrote:

I cant find any of those options. My wireless network card does advertise a speed booster I'd like to destroy to see if it helps the occasional 1700 ping I get.

Well, Speedbooster falls into Speed* wildcard I mentioned. Its one of the proprietary technologies and as such, if you're troubleshooting, better be turned off.

Also, I'm too tired to scan this thread again to check if it was mentioned, but STOP USING Wireless Zero Configuration (it may be named slightly different in Vista). Use the proprietary Linksys utility that came with your card instead.

WZC (in both XP and Vista) is known for creating lag spikes. I stopped using it after it made my Quake Wars experience... unpleasant.

Since you're using Vista, you may also google for "Vista anti-lag", which attempts to prevent the said service from performing wireless network scans. Apparently that works for some people.

At the moment, I'm sharing internet with our neighbor (the wife babysits a couple times a month for them for no charge, so they let us leech off the wireless connection), but with the way it's been running, I'm getting 1000-4000ms latency. I had resubbed WoW in hopes that this coming week I could finally get back in for a few hours, but at the rate I'm going, I can't even chat with this connection.

I was using a cheap $5 generic wireless PCI card that I found on pricewatch ages ago, and recently decided to invest some cash in a better one to toss in there to see if it would work better (never had much reason to before, because I was still running a Cat5 cable to the router whenever playing WoW, etc). Using the same setup, I wasn't seeing much difference. It didn't get as high as 4000ms again, but it was still between 700-2000ms, with long stretches of total packet loss.

Over the last couple days though I've been tinkering with a fresh installation of XP, which might just be what I needed to do. I'm now using a TrendNet 802.11g PCI card, which has the same chipset as the cheap one (RealTek), but came with software to monitor and configure the connection. This morning I was trying to connect it to the router, but lacking WZC (didn't know what that was called until now... never liked it, but thought I had to use it, though that was mostly due to the cheap card not coming with any software), I was forced to finally use the card's software to connect. My god it was way easier. And I got far better download speeds when I had to go grab the nvidia drivers and DX9c this morning. I haven't tried WoW yet, but with this increase in speed, I'm hopeful at least.

My neighbor never bothered setting a new admin password, so I'll see if I can find any speed boosting settings on there, or on my card, if I'm still having issues... hopefully I won't have to bother with that though. Thanks for the tips Shiho.

Another idea - since you don't have access to your neighbor's computer, it may not be very efficient but IMO it will improve things. Look into a program called cFosSpeed. If your neighbor is saturating their bandwidth constantly, thus causing horrible lag, cFosSpeed may allow you to push for a better latency in your connection.

shihonage wrote:

Another idea - since you don't have access to your neighbor's computer, it may not be very efficient but IMO it will improve things. Look into a program called cFosSpeed. If your neighbor is saturating their bandwidth constantly, thus causing horrible lag, cFosSpeed may allow you to push for a better latency in your connection.

I'll try it out, but unless it fixes something I'm missing, I wouldn't pin much hope on seeing a difference. They're not really the type to put a lot of strain on the line, unless virtual slots really eat up bandwidth.

I re-checked my firewall and discovered all the ports for WoW had been cleared out somehow, so the firewall was blocking traffic. Correcting that made an immediate difference (obviously)

That's one thing to check, if you can, Pur.

WoW wants:
TCP 3724 for the game
UDP 3724 for voice chat
TCP 6112 and 6881-6999 for the downloader.

Tried again this morning. It was back up over 4000ms. No ports blocked that I can see. No real security at all beyond the TKIP key.

Tried cFosSpeed, but that spiked me up to 13000+ms, then settled around 2000ms. I set WoW.exe and Ventrillo.exe to high (was only using WoW though), and made sure it was optimizing my own connection to the router, but it just doesn't seem to be doing anything different.

What happens when you just ping the gateway from your computer? Do a ping -t 192.168.0.1 (or whatever your gateway IP is, but that's usually it), and watch what happens. How long are the ping replies, and how many don't come back?

After that, do a tracert 63.241.255.8. (that's the Blackhand server). Watch for where your ping goes up. If it starts high, then it's local; the more hops there are before you see any problems, the less likely it is to be a local problem.

Ping 192.168.1.1 Bytes=32 TTL=64
1: 2ms
2: 676ms
3: 1ms
4: 1ms

Hmm... Tried it four more times, but each time after that was always 1ms.

Doing the tracert was interesting. I'll just post it below.

C:\Documents and Settings\Veloreyn>tracert 63.241.255.8

Tracing route to 63.241.255.8 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 9 ms 8 ms 9 ms 73.128.152.1
3 7 ms 8 ms 8 ms ge-1-20-ur01.howardcounty.md.bad.comcast.net [68.87.131.89]
4 9 ms 11 ms 8 ms te-9-3-ar01.howardcounty.md.bad.comcast.net [68.87.129.37]
5 13 ms 10 ms 9 ms po-10-ar02.whitemarsh.md.bad.comcast.net [68.87.129.34]
6 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms po-90-ar01.whitemarsh.md.bad.comcast.net [68.86.252.217]
7 15 ms 12 ms 11 ms po-10-ar02.capitolhghts.md.bad.comcast.net [68.87.129.137]
8 12 ms 13 ms 11 ms po-10-ar01.capitolhghts.md.bad.comcast.net [68.86.252.213]
9 12 ms 16 ms 12 ms 12.86.111.5
10 50 ms 52 ms 50 ms tbr1.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.113.18]
11 50 ms 50 ms 52 ms tbr1.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.10.30]
12 49 ms 49 ms 50 ms tbr2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.10.90]
13 45 ms 46 ms 45 ms br2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.123.16.213]
14 50 ms 49 ms 49 ms 12.122.255.226
15 49 ms 50 ms 49 ms mdf001c7613r0004-gig-12-1.dal1.attens.net [63.241.193.14]
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.

Trace complete.

So 15 hops, then nothing. I can't ping the Blackhand server directly either, though I'm still able to connect to it. Any thoughts?

pretty common for routers not to respond to ping, thats a very common tracert result

Just now I was playing around with the router settings, and instead of worrying about if any ports were specifically blocked, I went ahead and put in a rule for wow.exe on port 3724 for both TCP and UDP, just to see if it would make any difference. While I'm still getting frequent random moments of lag (1-3 seconds seems to be typical), I'm now steady in the 100ms latency range. With the random lag I don't think I'll do a lot of instance running, but this at least opens up the possibility.

It's really weird that forwarding WoW ports would do anything at all. They're not connecting to you - you're connecting to them. I certainly am not forwarding any WoW ports and it works fine...

shihonage wrote:

It's really weird that forwarding WoW ports would do anything at all. They're not connecting to you - you're connecting to them. I certainly am not forwarding any WoW ports and it works fine...

I think it was just a coincidence. Logged in this morning and was back up around 1000ms.

Edit: I'm toying with the idea of turning my (currently unused) WRT54GL router into a bridge, and running a Cat5 cable from it to my PC. I've never had any trouble with a wired connection to my PC, but wireless connections have always given me problems... so I'm thinking if I remove that element from the PC's setup, and use my router to handle all that, then it might help the situation out a bit (I'm coming to the conclusion that my PC just doesn't play well with wireless setups).

The one ping at 647ms looks unhealthy. You might want to run a ping -t 192.168.0.1 and just let it run awhile, see what it does. 10 or 15 minutes would be good. Watch for spots with high latency or completely dropped packets.

The WRT54GL _might_ help, but it's entirely possible the neighbor's router just sucks. You might consider installing your GL over there instead... might just clear the problems.

Malor wrote:

The one ping at 647ms looks unhealthy. You might want to run a ping -t 192.168.0.1 and just let it run awhile, see what it does. 10 or 15 minutes would be good. Watch for spots with high latency or completely dropped packets.

The WRT54GL _might_ help, but it's entirely possible the neighbor's router just sucks. You might consider installing your GL over there instead... might just clear the problems.

I hate to say it, but I don't trust him enough to lend him my hardware... while his wife is nice, and we originally became friends with her, her husband's a bit of a sleeze. I'll think about it if this doesn't work.

I'm hoping that the 676ms was an issue with my PC, since my machine happened to lag right after I hit enter (this being on the older installation, which has been in desperate need of a reformat for ages now).

Edit: First try attempting to set up my router as the bridge failed, but I'm pretty sure at this point that it's an issue with my PC... every so often I'd lose connection with my own router, even though it wasn't on the net. Hopefully I'll get this working as a bridge, and I can drop the Wireless PCI card altogether. Using a Cat5 to enter the settings was working far better.

Update:

Updated the firmware on my router to DD-WRT V23, and went through the guide I was looking at. I originally started with OpenWRT, but nearly bricked my router trying to get it to work, and never did find how to do it. Once I used DD-WRT though it took me around 10 minutes to set everything up, and it's running pretty well so far. I've got the wireless PCI card disabled (will be removing it tomorrow), and I'm now getting sub-150ms latency ratings in WoW. I was averaging around 100ms for the most part (over the course of around two hours), which I'm quite happy with.

[mod edit: no]

Weirdest thread necro ever....

No so wierd. Another worthless spambot is born.