Dearest disgruntled community:<br /><br />Recently I have noticed A LOT of people experiencing server lag. As the problem trends upward I thought I would respond with some ideas as to why individual server lag may occur and what you can do to isolate the problem(s). <br /><br />In my experience the problem is almost always local. By that I mean it&#039;s occurs between your computer and your ISP (Comcast, Qwest, Timewarner, etc). There are times when the large internet companies that control data transit are having issues. You can check for that by going to this website: http://internethealthreport.com/. Almost never is that the problem. Those companies have very complex routing schemes to avoid down time and latency. For more information research Border Gateway Protocol. It&#039;s an interesting read if you&#039;re a giant geek.<br /><br />I would venture a guess that a bulk of the issues people are having are with their own hardware and software. For instance, I personally use something called powerline ethernet adapters to get from my computer to my router. Recently I found out that when pinging my router I was getting 700ms ping. That indicated to me that someone was either raping my internal network (hulu, torrents, youtube) or that the powerline adapters were not functioning correctly. I checked for bandwidth abuses, yelled at Ladna and then replaced the adapters. I was back to normal within an hour. Some other things I&#039;ve found to hinder my network&#039;s performance include:<br /><br />[list]<br />[li]antivirus software[/li]<br />[li]spyware/malware/viruses[/li]<br />[li]the ide auto-refresh feature[/li]<br />[li]auto-refreshing webpages (javascript and flash)[/li]<br />[li]using wireless internet, especially wireless-N for some reason[/li]<br />[li]weather[/li]<br />[/list]<br /><br />I will say that some server hosts are better than others, and I too have been having some latency issues with Totaltrash this season. One of the things I did was fix what I had control of. I checked all my local settings and made sure that nothing in my control was causing the problems. This should be your first step when experiencing lag or packet loss.<br /><br />Overall the way to find problems is to run a couple of simple commands. Ping your gateway to find out if the problem is between you and your modem/router. Trace route is handy to find out what is happening past your modem and iperf will give you most of the information you need to know regarding zdaemon packetloss. <br /><br />[list]<br />[li]Ping is a simple command and you need no server assistance. Open a cmd window and type ping -t [server ip address]. This will give you an idea of your latency NOT your packetloss. These are icmp packets and are not the same as udp packets. [/li]<br />[li]For tracing you also need no assistance from a server. Just open the cmd window and type tracert [server ip address]. This will give you the mfkin hops so often referred to by Kenneth.[/li]<br />[li]Iperf is more complicated only because you need a server admin to run the server side command to get results. Iperf is used to measure packet loss (udp or tcp). Since zdaemon&#039;s netcode uses UDP packets we specify the upd flag and get a tidy little percentage of how many packets were received. If you have any interest in doing this contact your local server admin. If they like you they will try to help![/li]<br />[/list] <br /><br />Which leads me to the conclusion. The main reason for multiple servers is to not make both teams play on a server that is bad for them. So far I&#039;ve seen 1 game on another server (I think). This indicates to me that despite public outcry Totaltrash Chicago seems to be the lesser of evils. If I ever see Quik again I will talk to him about moving FDC, I haven&#039;t been too pleased with the server or the network and we had talked about moving the server if those issues didn&#039;t resolve. I encourage all captains to consult each other when scheduling games to find out if they agree on a different server. These servers are pretty much exclusively for IDL and can be used far more than they are being used now.<br /><br />If you&#039;re having trouble please feel free to drop me a PM. Despite my often offensive forum posts I am always willing to help people figure out their problems.