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Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

Kelly
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Registered: ‎04-04-2007

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

Hmm.
Before you do that, limit your upstream on bittorrent to about 100kbps and see if you see the same impact.  It  could actually be that you are maxing your upstream which would cause problems with latency.
Kelly Dorset
Ex-Broadband Service Manager
Froug
Grafter
Posts: 109
Registered: ‎21-03-2013

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

Sorry, I can't do that - the BitTorrent traffic is a guess, based on the fact that I can induce latency when starting the StarCraft II downloader, and (according to Google) it uses BitTorrent. I'll have a look later today and see if there are any options with respect to downloading within the client updater.
....and I just realised what you meant: I'm not serving BitTorrent, just downloading (unless StarCraft turns my system into a BitTorrent sever when its running).
Kelly
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Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

If you aren't seeing issues normally and it's only when doing lots of upload activity, that could well be it.  You can control upstream QoS on the 582 router which may help.  There was a good thread about it here: http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,116556.0.html
Kelly Dorset
Ex-Broadband Service Manager
Froug
Grafter
Posts: 109
Registered: ‎21-03-2013

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

I'm not uploading as far as I know. The current latency issue is induced by starting the StarCraft II client. It automatically downloads/updates the game once it's running, probably via BitTorrent. I'll do some digging to confirm that doing this does not generate any upload activity.
We do not use BitTorrent in any way other than when games client update/launchers use it to update game clients (WoT and Blizzard game launchers appear to do this).
Kelly
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Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

The Blizzard downloader is Bittorrent based which means while it is downloading bits of the files for you, it is also uploading parts of the files to other players.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Blizzard_Downloader
Kelly Dorset
Ex-Broadband Service Manager
nanotm
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Registered: ‎11-02-2013

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

Kelly
shouldn't they have an option to disable uploading of the files on the client ? otherwise its no wonder nothing is playable if the updater is acting as a peer seed for multiple clients .......
just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Froug
Grafter
Posts: 109
Registered: ‎21-03-2013

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

Thanks Kelly -  that is annoying, and explains what I'm seeing. I'll try tinkering with QoS on the router, and see if I can stop the Blizzard launcher using BitTorrent.
Kelly
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Posts: 5,497
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Registered: ‎04-04-2007

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

You may be able to disable the P2P element of it, instead  it will just download directly.  It may take longer to download though:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2140504088
Kelly Dorset
Ex-Broadband Service Manager
Froug
Grafter
Posts: 109
Registered: ‎21-03-2013

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

....and you hit the nail on the head Kelly. Disabling "peer-to-peer" in the launcher (which I assume disables BitTorrent), did the trick.
Annoying, to say the least. One follow-up question from me: why don't you enable QoS on the upstream side of the router by default?
nanotm
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Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

if that's fixed the problem then that's going to be a bonus, but its rather scary its taken all this to get to the bottom of the problem
just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Kelly
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Posts: 5,497
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Registered: ‎04-04-2007

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

No, we've got 2 separate things.  One is the profile updating incorrectly.  That is a bug on our side and ut keeps recurring, hence the continued bouncing of this thread.
The 2nd was the upstream contention problem.
Kelly Dorset
Ex-Broadband Service Manager
gary42
Grafter
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Registered: ‎09-07-2012

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

Quote from: Froug
One follow-up question from me: why don't you enable QoS on the upstream side of the router by default?

Upstream QOS is enabled by default however may need some tweaking to match your use.
In my case this was for an online backup service running over HTTPS where I needed to change the priority of an existing rule and FTP uploads to my web server for which I had to create a new rule.
I didn't have much success with bit-torrent type traffic as it was too difficult to easily identify all the connections.

Froug
Grafter
Posts: 109
Registered: ‎21-03-2013

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

Frankly, this is unreasonable. Non-technical users will be dead-in-the-water if they have to use a terminal emulator to login to their router to change their upstream QoS settings to resolve the lag in their favourite online game.
I know this is complicated, but I did not have ANY issues of this kind with BE.
nanotm
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Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

the problem is bit torrent, if you allow it as incoming only on the router then it will also block it from downloading (because you have to upload the "send next packet now " command.....however on the plus side it does prove 2 things, your old isp throttled torrents and PlusNet clearly doesn't
which is both a blessing and a curse as your finding out, i'm sure there is a simple way of limiting all p2p traffic uploads to under 10% so your connection wont get saturated....of course it might require exceptions to be added for some games (on an ip by ip basis) so they work fine
really the problem rather than being isp based is game downloader based, it should have a simple setting menu that allows you to cap uploads
just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Froug
Grafter
Posts: 109
Registered: ‎21-03-2013

Re: Just joined from BE - ping spikes making gaming unplayable

Yes, but, how does the non-technical user resolve this? Shouldn't PN do more to ensure that their routers and network are configured such that users do not have problems when using popular applications/games?
Perhaps this is a corner case, but given my bad experience with the speed profile issue, I wonder how widespread problems really are.