Horrific loading times and other connection issues

[Raist]

This is an issue that began since the last hotfix, though. I went away for the weekend and when I came back, suddenly I was having these sorts of problems when they'd never existed before.

Given that multiple other people are also complaining about having connection issues, I'm inclined to think that these things are all related.

EDIT: I should also add that other members of my FC have been experiencing connection problems as well. We're scattered all across the US on different ISPs, making it highly unlikely that that's the problem here.

The congestion issues being discussed in that thread don't typically come from our last mile ISP's (the ones we pay directly for internet access), but the higher tier 1 NSP's they subscribe to for the internet connectivity to everyone else's networks. There are three major ones that nearly all our traffic gets routed through on it's way to Montreal---and amongst them there are less than a dozen routes available. So, when just even one of those routes goes tits-up, it affects a large number of people across multiple regions and multiple ISP's at once.

Running a trace to your particular server will likely shed some light on just where you may be running into problems along the way to SE's servers. To ping other servers/services is not a valid indication of what is going on with your specific route to your game server Montreal. For instance, unless you are in Canada yourself or along the border, I'm pretty sure you aren't getting a 12-18ms ping time to your game server--especially if you are on cable.. I could see 30-50... but to be consistently under 20ms seems a bit unlikely unless you are right there and only have a couple hops to get in to SE's network.

If you are running on a console, there have been recurring networking issues with the subsystems the consoles rely on for quite some time now that may be coming into play here as well. The PSN issues are in Sony's court and not SE to address, and DNS issues fall to the provider you use (which you can change). If you are on PC, might want to check to see if there have been any changes to your system recently (Windows Update may have just hit the wire, if you have a Belkin router there have been issues with their last update to their heartbeat subsystem, may want to check for malware, etc.).