Sniper's Paradise!
[Players Guide to Unreal Netcode]
2. Internet basics:
This will cover basic information about what "speed" and connection qualitiy mean on the internet. If you already know what ping/latency, bandwidth, tracert and packet loss are, you probably can skip this.
Usually connection speed is given in kb/sec or kbit/sec. This "speed" is called bandwidth, and it's not all that matters. The second component is called latency and describes the time that data actually needs to reach its target. It is usually measured in milliseconds (1/1000 seconds, ms) and often referenced as ping (though ping is actually twice the actual latency because it first sends something to the target and then gets an answer back from the target). A good analogon to see the relevance of both factors is to imagine a truck loaded with ten thousand harddisks, each with 10 gigabyte of data. Say the truck makes 50km/h - if you transported the data with it to some place 100 km away, you'd have a bandwidth of approximately 1gb/sec! Now would anyone want to play over that connection? I guess not. :)
As Unreal players know, a lot of different values are called ping - Unreal itself gives two, and both are not the "standard" icmp ping (often called dos ping because windows offers a commandline program called ping). More on the Unreal pings later.
If you want to find out why you have a bad connection to a server, it is a good idea to first check the route (the path your data takes to the server and vice versa) to it. Find out the address of the server (either ip or url), open a dos box and type "tracert <ip/url>". You will see the path your data takes to the server takes, and you will also see the ping to each "hop".
If you see a ping increase at some point (say, ping to the first hops is 30, then after some point its greater 100 for all hops) you can be sure it is not the server or your machine itself making problems, but the internet itself. Unfortunately there isn't much you can do about that usually. If the problem persists, try to contact your isp and show him some tracert results.
There are a lot of public domain and shareware tools that are a lot better at "tracing" than tracert is. I personally like ping plotter (Pingplotter), but try yourself what you like best.
Data on the internet is transfered in packets. Now if for whatever reason (often it's a capacity shortbreak or a piece of damaged hardware at some point) some packets don't reach their target, that is called packet loss. To find out where that happens, use one of the tools mentioned above (ping plotter does a fine job at it). If either of those happen already at the first hop, chances are good something is wrong with your local setup and/or hardware. If it only happens at the last hop (the server itself), there probably is something wrong with - you guessed it - the server.
Some (very rough) guidelines on what you can expect as icmp ping (this only applies to Germany - average connection quality varies a lot from country to country):
| ISDN | ~20 ms to first hop, 30 ms to a server with a
good connection to you. |
| TDSL (no fastpath) | ~30-60 ms to first hop, 40-80 ms to a good server,
depends on interleaving factor |
| TDSL (fastpath) | slightly (~5 ms) better than ISDN |
| QDSL | ~10-15 ms to first hop, 25-35 to a server with a
good connection to you. |
If you dont get even close to these values, there could be a lot of reasons - crappy isp, crappy setup on your machine, crappy or overloaded systems at your dialup node, crappy routing are the most important coming to mind.
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