!FIX! for Connection Issues (Lag, 90K, etc)

[Raist]

mileage can vary with this depending on vendor and their implementation of the feature. It's more or less like a bursting trick, and for it to work smoothly there needs to be compliant infrastructure in place. For instance, some cable or DSL subscribers may not notice much difference because of how the flow control works to cap bandwidth on the system--it already has a bursting mechanic in place of sorts. It might even worsen the condition depending on how much the modem queues between bursts if it leads to heavier fragmentation. Think of it like old RWIN tweaking and how things get flubbed when you disregarded MTU/MSS and such, or if you went too far with max connects per server settings--all the buffering needs to flow properly or you can wind up with increased retransmits.

{Edit:]
Out of curiosity I did some poking around with my Qualcomm, and apparently this setting may not be controlling the use of the feature, but toggling whether segmentation is being controlled at the NIC's engine or by the CPU. Depending on the chipset in use, some may get more mileage if they were able to get more optimized drivers for their network controller.

[KisaiTenshi]

mileage can vary with this depending on vendor and their implementation of the feature.

The reason it probably makes a difference probably has more to do with poor driver implementation combined with even poorer network infrastructure. To give an example, even if I disable nagle on my connection, it has no effect with this ISP, however the previous ADSL hardware it totally made a difference. I had to disable ECN (on a realtek chip) to play Mass Effect 2, but no other game.

What people should do before they dink around with this setting, because turning it off wholesale may break something.
Go to an administrative command prompt and type:
netsh interface tcp show global

You'll see something like this
Querying active state...

TCP Global Parameters
----------------------------------------------
Receive-Side Scaling State : enabled
Chimney Offload State : enabled
NetDMA State : enabled
Direct Cache Acess (DCA) : enabled
Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level : normal
Add-On Congestion Control Provider : ctcp
ECN Capability : enabled
RFC 1323 Timestamps : disabled

then type
netsh interface tcp show chimneystats

Idx Supp Atmpt TMax PMax Olc Failure Reason
--- ---- ----- ---- ---- --- --------------
22 No -n/a- 0 0 0 -n/a-
33 No -n/a- 0 0 0 -n/a-
25 No -n/a- 0 0 0 -n/a-
26 No -n/a- 0 0 0 -n/a-

If you see something like above, the TOE isn't even being used. So disabling it at the driver level is unlikely to change anything.

You can then force these settings off to troubleshoot things one at a time with:
netsh int tcp set global chimney=disabled
netsh int tcp set global ecncapability=disabled
netsh int tcp set global congestionprovider=none
netsh int tcp set global rss=none

Note do not set all of these at once, only set them to see if it fixes it, if it doesn't fix it, restore it to what it was before. In particular that last feature, receive side scaling (rss) can change the CPU load quite significantly.

[KisaiTenshi]

Just to bump this a little...

netsh interface tcp add chimneyapplication state=disable application="C:\Program Files (x86)\SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\game\ffxiv.exe"

Should disable TOE features as per the "seems like it fixed it" in the OP just for FFXIV, but I can't test it since my connection works fine.

[Cyran]

Hi

As this thread speaks of RealTek Network Cards/Chips, I just want to give an info: RealTek just released new drivers !!

I could not download/install the game (Error [30413][10009][10019]) and installing the new drivers solved my problem, at least for the installation (created my character this morning and plan to start palying tonight!)

Hope it helps some of you.

[Dhextosaurus]

This fixed all the lag, throttling, disconnects, delay and uplayability for me. For those desperate and that can't wait for a official fix, I strongly recommend you to try this. I was highly skeptical at first but it really removed all lag and freezing. Thanks a lot for sharing this, it really works!

EDIT:
Nvm, the lag is back.. and 10 times worse now, literally had 20 second hickups in the dungeon I was in right now and made the whole group wipe then forced to leave.. and crafting having like 10 second delay between each button press. Sigh.
This might work for some though, it did work for me yesterday but now I'm clueless of what to do. Restarting router and PC didn't do the trick either. I'm just waiting for a official fix/response about this, sucks though.

[dkbond]

I have a Netgear WNDA3100 Wireless USB adapter, are there similar settings for large send offload or is it just a completely different ballpark when dealing with certain adapters?

[KisaiTenshi]

I have a Netgear WNDA3100 Wireless USB adapter, are there similar settings for large send offload or is it just a completely different ballpark when dealing with certain adapters?

There are several features, only turn one off at a time. You can turn them off at the driver, or turn them off at the TCP/IP stack (which is what the netsh chimney commands do)

The feature in question is the "TOE" or "TCP Offload Engine" and LSO which is what "Large Send OffLoad" and "Large Receive Offload" are. Different network chips implementations are completely different. Some chips may have these as one and the same. LRO is implemented by the network driver, so if it's flaking out for just people with certain realtek chips with certain driver versions, there's the blame.

Basically changing the setting with the device manager means it is disabled at the driver(hardware) level and affects all applications. TOE and LRO are of most benefit to heavy network use (eg if you have a gigabit connection to your ISP, and can pull 125MB/sec, it saves 1Ghz of CPU time. FFXIV uses barely more than 10KB/sec so it doesn't benefit by having it on or off. Where you benefit most from this is if you have multiple computers in the same network (eg streaming a movie off the hard drive of a file server) or devices like the Apple Time Capsule.