Details about Server issues

[Raist]

Actually Burrmanchu, you have been the one launching the attacks... I've been more focused on trying to demonstrate the flaws with the logic behind them. Even after trying to address such inflammatory and off-topic posts, I still try to bring my post back to the actual topic brought forth in the OP. But it's hard sometimes to remain completely focused and civil when one is posting such insulting/inflammatory or otherwise detracting statements such as yours. If you are going to continue making such posts, you should be prepared for a little push back now and then.

The issue at hand is the routing issues we have been investigating, documenting, and getting our ISP's to address. The act of resetting the modem has been shown to be part of the standard troubleshooting process and at times even a critical part of the remedy to address ROUTING ISSUES THAT ARE DICTATED BY OUR ISP. SE has absolutely nothing to do with those policies, and little to no influence over what our ISP's routing partners are doing with their networks. Our ISP's are the ones with enforceable agreements to affect changes, changes that at times (again) require a modem reset.

No way around it... the process suggested was valid, relative, and depending on exactly what has been going on behind the scenes already may have actually resolved the issue for the OP, as there actually is a chance that it could have led him/her to switching to an alternate route assignment and bypassed the failing segment.

You have aggressively gone after people that gave valid suggestions on how to remedy the situation, and have attempted to take the thread off-topic. The issue at hand has nothing to do with SE's server stability issues---that is a completely separate issue. This thread has not been about server stability and connectivity, it has been about extreme latency that is interrupting communication in route---it is crashing before the server can even be reached. Even if after the maintenance and potentially reboot of their hardware and people are able to connect consistently again until they become overloaded once more, the type of latency issue brought forth by the OP will still be cropping up until it is properly addressed, and the advice put forth within this thread will still apply to addressing such issues.

Instead of reporting your actions (which I am beginnning to regret not doing), I chose to see this as a teachable moment and took the opportunity to try to demonstrate how and why this problem persists, how impactful the issue is, how one may go about addressing the issue properly, and why previous suggestions that had been challenged were correct. Perhaps I made an error in judgement in hoping to enlighten some forum members that might not have a good understanding of the situation and how to address it. The Dennis Miller bit was an attempt at injecting some levity into the aggressive tone that had sprung forth in the thread... a throw back to his early days of starting his witty diatribes with "I hate to get off on a rant here, but...". His criticisms always had a hint of truth buried in there, and if one paid close enough attention to them, some precious pearls of wisdom could be gathered.

Guess I just dated myself... oh well, it's a shame it has fallen on some deaf ears. But, hopefully it gets through to some, so it's worth the jabs I am now getting from you if it gets people more proactive in pushing their ISP's to get involved and improve things for more people.

Oh, and just an FYI... I in fact have recently rebooted my modem, got new channel alignments, and my local segments have been much more responsive since (thanks for asking). I will likely have to bounce it again this weekend though, and it's about time for them to open a new route as TATA has started to flake out on us now (will get to that in a second). It's been an ongoing process for about 2 months now while we've been trying to tackle a troublesome CMTS that at first was only bonding 4 channels (and poorly at that), eventually got up to 6, but is now finally running at full capacity with all 8 channels bonding. We finally tracked down the ingress that was knocking them offline, but they are concerned it may come back because of aging hardware and lines... TWC's infrastructure is in really bad shape down here. New channel lineups are on the way, and the hopes are that we may be able to get new assignments for network use and get away from the nearby transmissions at channels 31, 35, and 38 that have been giving us problems. Until then, we will have to continue to reboot our modems to lock on to cleaner primary channels whenever we see our headend's latency start spiking high--when things go south, it will start breaching a full second or more in delayed response at the start of our run, which just gets uglier as we go upstream towards Canada. Three guesses on the quickest way we resolve this issue...

A modem reset.

It should also be noted that latency has already begun to creep up on TATA's lines tonight (who my ISP has most recently paired me with after my last reset)---already picked up spikes over 700ms getting into Montreal via one of their routes. That's approaching a 3/4 second lag for a single transmission cycle between client and server (in case some aren't aware of the impact), and it isn't even prime time yet. Others may soon find similar issues with their routing as things get busier in the days/weeks to come. So, we may unfortunately find ourselves right back here again having the same debate, even after some may have gotten the impression that SE fixed all their latency woes with last night's maintenance.....