Dropping ping while gaming.

[[BTF]adam]

Alreeet, pointing yall in the direction of this thread: http://www.arenajunkies.com/showthread.php?t=112513

Basically I don't know if this actually works for Q2 or not but it works for other games, most notably WoW. I had a dumb ping to an european wow server, 300-250. I used this method and it's now 29-60 on average. highest ive seen it was 100 in a major city. significant difference, the other day i logged onto TS servers with a 180 ping and today after I did this I logged on with a 130 ping. 94 on T4.

Registry fix for latency issues


If you are very bad at following instructions, back up your registry file. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756

Open the Start menu and find Run, if you have vista you will have to search for the program.

When you open it type in the box Regedit and press Enter.

Open the tab HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Tab into SYSTEM

Tab into CurrentControlSet

Tab into Services

Scroll to the bottom of the section and find Tcpip, Tab into it

Tab into Parameters

Tab into Interfaces

There should be a few files in this section, find the one with a file called DhcpIPAddress which should have your IP Adress at the end of it.
i.e 192.168.1.xxx

Right click in a blank spot and select New --> Dword Value (might say 32-bit, thats fine)

Name the Dword TcpAckFrequency

Right click the Dword you just made and select Modify

Type in the "Value Data:" section "1" withought the quotes, so just a 1 in the box.

Click Okay, restart your internet connection and/or restart your computer. Your latency in online games should be drastically lower, with a noticeable difference.

[[BTF]adam]

Must add this is the instructions for XP, idk if it works on Vista, I think it does in win 7 though.

[reaper]

Not sure what you mean by "ping" but ping is generally refered to as like "ping www.google.com".  Where ping is using the ICMP protocol which does not use TCP in anyway.  The registry entry changes the behavior of ACK'ing TCP segments.  TCP makes sure if packets are dropped, they are resent again, making things reliable below the network layer.

You set a Window size, and send that much data, and you need to acknowledge the data on the other end before more can be sent.  This registry entry changes the behavior of the TCP alogrithms used to ACK data.  I'd think the defaults would be okay.  The window size on Windows is a little small for backwards compatiblity, but for something like Wow, I can't see what it would matter.

For example download a file through a real fast connection on Windows, then try Linux.  Linux uses an extended option for Window sizes where it shifts the bit, so you can send a whole lot more data at once.

Anyways, I'm just saying I'd use stuff like that with caution, TCP has very complicated algorithms to take account for packet loss, and messing with them might not be the best thing to do.

[[BTF]adam]

all I know is there's 8 pages of people praising it and it dropped my ping in wow by a good 150-200 at the very least, the response time on skills and movement is extremely noticeable. like the guy said who wrote that stuff, you arent editing anything just adding a file. at worse you delete it.

[reaper]

Seems a bit odd to me..

"ping" like "ping IP" has nothing at all to do with TCP, it does not use TCP ACK's ever, which is what the registry information is changing the behavior for.

It uses ICMP, which doesn't care if you drop a packet yet alone use ACK's.  It's a simple protocol, and just the alphabet in ASCII in a packet.


The other Wow server could have some weird TCP stack/configuration causing an issue, and the ping you may be referring to might not really be ping.  But i'd have to see a packet capture.

[[BTF]adam]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328890

tldr: even microsoft approve of this, fortunately the whole thing was reworked in windows 7 apparently and it doesent need to be done, but this needs to be done manually in XP as per pasted.

[reaper]

Here is the problem explained:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=6214123217&sid=1

It also looks like if the Wow server kept sending a little data to keep TCP going smooth, the problem would be gone as well.

[ReCycled]

Can we get a screenshot of what the fix looks like when its keyed into the registry?  Some of the text explanation is unclear.

Thanx
 

[|iR|Focalor]

This is exactly how the admins are hacking dawk and messing with his connection. Shame on you, admins.

[QwazyWabbit]

Can we get a screenshot of what the fix looks like when its keyed into the registry?  Some of the text explanation is unclear.

Thanx
 

It varies depending on the interface. The actual branch depends on the GUID of the network interface so it can't be pre-programmed or predfined.

You are going here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces

Then you have to identify the interface you want to tweak using the IP address that appears in each of the GUID branches under the interfaces.

Once you have identified the interface, it's a simple matter to add the new registry key and value.

Note: This is a TCP tweak, not a UDP tweak. It probably won't affect the ping on FPS games like Quake 2 that use UDP.

WOW ping is probably an average round-trip time based on how fast the client acknowledges server frames. Forcing your system to only allow 1 outstanding frame makes the ping look better.

Q2's protocol doesn't depend on this kind of measurement.

"ping" in Q2 is a measure of the RTT between client and server as measured on the UDP packets between them and these are timed by the Q2 server system, not the TCP stack.

The purpose of letting more than one TCP packet be acknowledged is to reduce the number of acks transmitted. If several TCP packets come in, they can be acknowledged in bulk rather than individually. In TCP this can happen when some packets are delayed in transit and many packets to the same session arrive together at the destination. UDP never acks frames, this is the job of the application, not the operating system since UDP is "connectionless".

[RRBM [NL]]

http://www.speedguide.net/
http://www.j79zlr.com/cablenutXP2k.php

For tcp/ip tweaks

[[BTF]adam]

this what you mean recycled?

[ReCycled]

Yes,just to see how the rest looks and if the value is hex or not. If anything goes wrong I guess you just delete your new entry. I changed it in the registry and I'll give it a few days to see if there's any improvement.

  

[ReCycled]

So I gave this 5 days and nothing remarkable happened. Actually it's exactly the same. The only change was - previously when I would start Quake and looked at the server list, nothing showed initially. I had to refresh around 4 or 5 times to bring up any servers. It's a if my DSL modem is in sleep mode and needs prodding to recognize that I'm trying to connect somewhere. Same with first accessing the internet. It takes a while. I don't even attempt Mail until I've got a clear connection to the net.
Anyway that change seems to switch on the modem faster when I try to connect. One refresh is all I need. However, mysteriously, it's back to sleep mode and I haven't touched the registry. And I still get my horrible delay problem. I'm like a half to a full second behind the action that seems to be in front of me while playing. And I ping 70, which is fine.