Latency/Connection Issues Since the Launch of the EU Data Center

[Moonraker]

Edit: I must apologize if you feel I am singling you out or anything negative like that, it's just that I frequently see posts in these threads that miss important details, or otherwise may by applying something improperly to the specific problem--in this case, as detailed below, some of the test results cannot be used as a proper gauge of the QoS specifically to the demarcation point to the SE datacenter. I don't want to discourage the participation and detailed results from coming in...we just need to make sure that the data is relevant and potentially actionable information.

You are again loosing packets first at the exchange point between Opentransit and Level3---an election made by your ISP's routing policies.

Also still showing bad latency spikes in France---high enough to cause out of order packets. In the scope of this game, it can disrupt the quality of play (stuttering, pausing/speedup rubberbanding, etc.). Those ping test app ratings are not necessarily indicative of more critical dataflows---they are typically evaluating more in the scope of VOIP and video streaming, both of which are buffered and thus more tolerant of higher intermittent spikes and jitter.

Pingtest and such are also not necessarily testing along the same ISP's either. The Pingtest test is against Vodafone. More specifically, 145.253.248.206-- AS3209 is their ID for BGP. When I run a looking glass from Paris, I get slung through Telia to get to KDDI/SE---but Vodafone peers directly from that location (no Telia). When I trace to that Vodafone IP from home, I got bad spiking at hbg-bb1-link.telia.net [213.155.131.246]--an address not present in my pathing to KDDI, amongst other segments (after Ashburn's B2 hop, it can vary between B3 and B4, the B4 route it used for Vodafone routed differently to Germany then it did for SE last night--they appear to use different next-hop values in their tables).

Also when I trace from home to 95.172.92.166 (the IP for Germany in that DSL test you linked), I am using Cogent instead of Telia. From the same looking glass in Paris, it is using Telia but the next hop is 213.248.93.249--to get to SE the next hop is 213.248.93.81.

Not saying for certain it is the same for your ISP, but the possibility is there for the routing to be considerably different. So those ping test apps are not necessarily giving an indication of the specific path to SE's servers.

Also, here is the pingtest.net description of a B rating:

**Their MOS scoring is an evaluation of the quality of a voice call. This game does not buffer in kind and is thus highly dependent on the timely, orderly delivery of the packets. Also note your score has an asterisk, indicating that one metric failed testing--it even tells you it failed the packet loss test in red text. Also note a very specific statement in there as well:

"Some online games may not perform optimally."

Should also note a statement at the DSL test as well:

(in other words, localized issues may impact the results dramatically)

No problem with your desire to ensure that data posted is as useful as possible. It's great to have that interest and input.

I understand your reasoning and that general ISP/ network issue scan and will impact any test. However we can only provide data as an end user and hope that this gives some help/ indication for SE to move forward with some resolution to this issue which effects a number of their customers (hence this thread)

The links posted were really only to show that generally I do not suffer issues with poor jitter generally over my connection. it is what the test showed (as it was to a lot of sites around the globe and takes a aggregate result) This is not specific to the Data Center for the game.

All the points you made are totally valid and routing etc. will definitely impact results and potential issues. However, I must consider what I can which is the issues I have with lag/ hitching experienced each evening during primetime play ever since the data centre move. Even with lower latency this problem stems from that date.

Each evening I am looking at another PingPlotter analysis which shows the same thing; namely little packet loss until reaching the initial hop for KDDI which hosts the SE European Data Center and on through each hop thereafter to the final world server (PL at hop 6 is typical of hub not prioritising ICMP hence drops them but is not mirrored to PL after this hop. Generally it is expected)

This packet loss around 10%+ seems the most likely candidate for this issue from the data, like from this evening 10 minute sample;



If you have a better explanation for the jump in consistent packet loss from hop 9 into the KDDI network I would be interested to hear it.

Just to note that if you see spikes of latency in the samples it is mostly me just opening a web page etc. Given a 2MB ADSL connection even this will quickly take the available 264 Kb/sec ^^ This will also mess the Jitter calculation too.

All this is just trying to provide what data I can to help them find some root cause and fix it because it is continuing. If there is better way to do so I'm happy to do it.