Have I messed something up?

[ColonicBoom]

Just got my Netduma, read everything (include a ton of stuff in the forum) and set it up following the guides/tours…

But my experience so far has been pants, so I’m hoping that someone can give me a hand.

 

I don’t know much about networks by the way.

I only play Xbox (360 and One), and the huge majority of that is CoD, BO3 is in at the moment on Xbox One so that’s what I’m setting up around.

 

Setup:

UK (near London).

Virgin Media (Cable)

Pay for 60 down / 3 up

Receive 63 down / 3 up (it’s solid, doesn’t vary much from this bandwidth in speedtests).

Netduma arrived with latest firmware 1.03.6g.

Virgin Superhub in ‘modem mode’ (it’s junk as a router)

Asus RT-N66U ‘Dark Knight’ (flashed with latest Merlin firmware) as router.

 

Superhub > Netduma (wired) > Dark Knight (in Access Point mode) (wired).

Xbox One, Tivo, Apple TV wired to Netduma.

Phones / tablets / laptops wirelessly connecting to Dark Knight (they want 5Ghz and I need the Dark Knight for extra wireless reach) and a few devices wirelessly connected to Netduma.

 

Netduma ‘Internet Diagnostics’ says Ping / Jitter / Spikes are exceptional, No packet loss.

‘Show Details’ shows ping to 8.8.8.8 to be:

round-trip min/avg/max: 12.023/13.091/13.940.

Trace 9 hops.

 

Nat is always open, Xbox One ping to servers (Seattle?) is 154ms which is exactly the same as it was pre-netduma.

DNS looks different though, with Netduma my primary DNS looks like a MAC address and my secondary DNS is 0.0.0.0. I’m sure it was just an IP address previously but don’t know if it matters anyway.

 

I thought this all looked pretty good so I set up the rest of the stuff as follows…

 

Wifi:

Changed WPA-PSK2, SSID, password, channel.

 

Port-Forwarding (to reserved IP for Xbox One):

53 tcp/udp

80 tcp

88 udp

3074 tcp/udp

3075 tcp/udp

500 udp

3544 udp

4500 udp

Xbox One recommended ports + BO3 recommended (these are what I had set up pre Netduma).

 

UPnP:

Disabled (due to Port Forwarding being set up).

 

LAN:

All settings default, except Disabled IPv6 as was suggested in the forum.

 

DCHP Lease:

Reserved Xbox One IP

Reserved Dark Knight IP.

 

WAN:

All settings default, except Disabled IPv6 as was suggested in the forum.

 

Miscellaneous:

Deep Packet Enabled (I’ve tried ‘Disabled’ too but left it on because it defaulted to that).

Auto feedback Enabled

Cookies Enabled

All others Disabled.

 

Added admin password.

 

Auto Cloud Enabled + Bleeding Edge Enabled.

 

 

Congestion Control:

 

Entered Bandwidth 63/3, auto set up router.

Anti-Flood algorithm automatically became ‘Reactive’.

 

I left all devices equal up+down, ‘share excess’ ticked

 

Tested speeds and was getting full upload/download as expected.

Tested Internet Diagnostics again, all exceptional, no packet loss.

Happy days.

 

Then I tested my Bufferbloat on DSL Reports, oh dear.

Latency was fine (24ms)

Speeds were full (63/3)

Buffer bloat C (upload saw a lot of bouncing into the orange and red)

Quality A+

Speed C.

 

Then I retested with all ‘access blocked’ (Device Manager) except the Mac for testing obviously.

Left Anti-Flood at 100% up+down.

Set priority 100% up+down for Mac, with ‘share excess’ disabled up+down, for good measure.

 

Latency (25ms)

Speed (41/2.8)

Buffer bloat A (upload was near perfect)

Quality A

Speed D

 

I tested this a few times and the results were the same, I’m losing a third of my download bandwidth (and a little bit of upload) by giving 100% priority to my Mac.

 

I reset the ‘Distribution Priority’ to check that my internet wasn’t playing up, and replicated the first result almost exactly. Speeds were back to full and buffer bloat was back to ‘sucky’.

 

Set it back to 100% for the Mac (excess share disabled) and again I am missing a third of the download bandwidth.

Tried changing the ‘share excess’ option - same results.

Restarted Netduma - same results.

 

Surely this isn’t right is it? Why is my bandwidth negatively affected by assigning priority at 100%?

 

Tried ‘preemptive’, anti-flood at 100% up/down, reset distribution to equal, ticked ‘share excess’.

Latency 24ms

Speed 42/3

Buffer bloat C

Quality A

Speed D

 

So ‘preemptive’ takes about a third of the download bandwidth out of action regardless of ‘distribution’ settings.

 

Did the same test again with distribution set to 100% for the Mac and disabled ‘share excess’.

Latency 24ms

Speed 33/2.8

Buffer bloat A

Quality A

Speed F

 

So this takes away even more bandwidth, almost half of the download bandwidth missing at 100% priority.

 

 

I was just playing with this to see how it affected things and those are my results, if anyone can shed some light on this then please do, 30-50% missing bandwidth is far from ideal.

 

I reset all of this and went back to buffer bloat…

‘preemptive’ 70% download / 85% upload gave me:

A+ buffer bloat

A+ quality

F speed (on account of Virgin media’s disgusting upload allowance).

Happy again.

I left ‘priority’ alone completely.

 

Added Xbox One/Xbox Live ‘basic’ to ‘Hyper-Traffic’.

Left all other devices ‘Blocked’ in ‘Device Manager’ but nobody was at home and all other devices were off so all bandwidth was mine anyway.

 

 

Time for some BO3 testing and ‘host filtering’…

 

Pre Netduma:

I wasn’t haven’t too bad a time but obviously I wanted to get it as good as it can be…

I’ve played BO3 a LOT, I’ve grinded my way to prestige master 225 or something like that and I’m pretty gutted to end a game with anything lower than a 2.00 k/d now (not important but now you know that I know how the game plays and feels).

 

The majority of my games were 32-50ms. I don’t mean somewhere in that ping range, I mean the ping would fluctuate every second or two between 32ms and 50ms - I’m interested to know if this fluctuation matches other people’s experience in BO3 (maybe this is normal?).

This is only according to the in-game ping graph (when you press start) by the way.

Nearly everyone in these lobbies is on a 4-bar connection, sometimes the odd 3-bar and they would then dominate.

I was getting some games with stuttering like the frame rate had gone wrong (especially at the beginning of games), the odd game with rubber banding, very few (like 5 total ever) ‘Host Migrations’ and quite a few wtf moments per game - mostly people who would continually ‘pause’ when running or in mid-air and then become hard to predict (or even see) where they were, then appearing suddenly and killing me, some iffy hit-detection, ‘dropped’ bullets, one-bullet-full-health deaths, round-the-corner deaths, running in treacle, etc.

And almost every time someone uses their mic in game it causes noticeably bad lag, I’ve played a lot and have noticed this way too much for it to be coincidence. Often when you kill someone, they swear down their mic and then I lag, if I mute this person then the mic-caused lag will go completely. These problems are obviously what I was hoping to minimise with the Netduma.

 

1 in 20 lobbies would be a solid 32-33ms throughout the whole game and I would then completely dominate the game with a 5-10k/d ratio, these lobbies run perfectly, never miss a frame, nobody lags, solid hit-detection, etc - so I know that these lobbies/hosts do exist in this game.

 

Rarely, but occasionally, games were so laggy it would just time-out with everyone running on the spot, flashing connection warning, disconnect error, like it did when the game first came out.

 

And a fair few lobbies would have enough intermittent lag that I would back out of because the number of wtf moments would became to much to bear.

 

There are nearly always a couple of French / German / Dutch / Spanish / Italian players in the lobbies, this seems to cause unreliable games for me, if it chucks someone from Norway / Sweden / Greece in there then I might as well back out because the lobby will be completely ruined in my experience. I’ve got nothing against anyone from anywhere but it’s just too unreliable. I remember all British lobbies in MW/MW2/MW3 where a foreign person was a novelty that only ever happened late in the evening (and then you had to back out because they ruined it).

 

I completely lose it when I get dominated by a person with a 0.4k/d because they amble through my bullets like a terminator and then wave their gun around with all the aiming skill of Stevie Wonder and kill me with a single stray bullet in the leg so I thought I could use the Netduma to try to minimise this…

 

 

With Netduma:

I have tried all sorts of things in ‘Host Filtering’ based on the guide and the forum posts and at best I can get games that are about as good as they were before I got the Netduma - most ‘Filtering’ options seem to result in lobbies that are so much worse than they were before. I almost never saw any 1-bar players before but now I see a lot, I also see a lot of lobbies where the player ping bars just jump around like a Equaliser on a sound-system, a lot of games have a wildly fluctuating ping (30/50/30/80/14/120/30/400ms changing every couple of seconds), complete drops of connection, pings hitting ‘0’ and then you’re dead with no kill cam, skipping audio, all sorts of nasty.

 

These are some of the filters I’ve tried:

1. True location, two clicks auto-snap, ping assist 40, strict ticked = not bad, basically pre Netduma results, but definitely not an improvement (and that was the point), distant servers, majority players outside of UK (2 dots in the UK and the rest spread across Europe).
2. True location, one click auto-snap, ping assist 33 = same as above really, hit and miss, mostly people across Europe, servers thousands of miles away, more people out of the UK than in it.
3. Location as centre of UK, search circle to include UK & Ireland, no ping assist, strict = worst lobbies I’ve had in any online game ever, literally not one decent lobby using this, like everybody in the UK is playing on a 3G tether.
4. Location in the ocean (nothing in the search circle), ping assist 27, strict = last night this was incredible, near instant search, brilliant lobbies, total epic domination by me for three hours. Today, no lobbies at all.
5. Same as above, ping at 33, hit and miss, very slow search, lots of 2+3-bar players, far too many wtf moments to make it enjoyable, total domination by one bullet-proof player in the lobby that will kill you with one shot to the leg. Completely unpredictable 50/50s. Loads of round-the-corner deaths.

 

Sorry, this was such a massive post, I thought best to put all my setup and settings in rather than the back and forth questioning if I didn’t put enough.

 

So here are my problems/questions...

Have I messed something up with my initial setup or settings?

Why am I losing so much bandwidth when I activate ‘Priority / Distribution’?

Am I using the Geo-Filter wrong? (Half the time only 3 dots show up at all - yes, I’m zooming out to check).

Do I need to reboot when I change the Geo-Filter?

The UI hangs a lot for me so I need to refresh it frequently, any solution? (Using Chrome)

Streaming to AppleTV is painful, frequent drops and restarts required.

Is the DNS on my Xbox ok?

Profile loading throws up a variety of errors and drops settings, so I have to check everything before I game and then change everything after I game. Any solution?

Why am I getting so many trash lobbies full of laggy bullet-sponges and not a single decent UK-majority lobby?

 

I have faith in the Netduma but at the moment my gaming is worse with it than it was before.

 

Any advice is welcome.

Cheers

J

[iAmMoDBoX]

Have I messed something up with my initial setup or settings?

I would let the Netduma do all the port forwarding, since it is meant for gaming it does a pretty good job at this by itself. Also, you should uncheck deep packet processing since you don't game on a PC.

 

Why am I losing so much bandwidth when I activate ‘Priority / Distribution’?

I would reset your distribution for download and only mess with upload, giving most of it to your console since you only have 3 up which isn't much to share with a household.

 

Do not believe the in game ping, it lies. As for your ping fluctuating in game, it probably isn't if you look at the duma's ping graph. On the weekends it seems like the servers are trash so this could be why ping assist worked before but it's not working now. I find that on the weekends I can only get into lobbies with 30+ ms ping and on during the week I've hit as low as 12ms

[ColonicBoom]

I wouldn't have thought that with the correct ports forwarded (been using most of those ports for several years since the Xbox 360 and never had an issue) that UPnP could be causing these problems but I'll test it. As far as I'm aware the ports are more or less just involved in NAT issues and my NAT is always open anyway.

 

Congestion Priority/Distribution is not an issue for my lag here, all devices were disabled / disconnected at the time I was playing (except my Xbox and laptop).

And when I was testing the distribution 'flower' the laptop was the only thing connected. I just don't see why, when Anti-Flood Up/Down are both at 100% and Distribution is at 100% a relatively large amount of bandwidth 20mb+ just disappears and is not available to the only device on the network.

 

Totally agree about the ping graph, I've had my doubts about it's reliability since I first looked at it but it definitely shows a lack of stability with the connection because the graph goes nuts when the game lags, the 200-400ms spikes are obvious like a slap in the face when you're playing.

 

The servers definitely seem much more flakey at the weekends, overload I assume which is just poor from Activision/Treyarch/Microsoft - I'll bear that in mind and try different ping assist values at different times/days.

 

I've disabled Deep Packet now - it's still all over the place in games though.

[Zennon]

I would also let the dumas UPnP open ports, if you have an open NAT then that is all you need.

 

I also leave the device priority alone and use the congestion control do it's work for local congestion.

 

To rule out jitter as you are with Virgin media I would test for ISP congestion as they are known to be bad for gaming with ping jitter.

 

Test at peak time with pingplotter pro free for 30 days then it will revert to the free version.

 

https://www.pingplotter.com/download.html

 

Do not use the internet as you test, type 8.8.8.8 into target and press go leave it for around 20 mins in peak time and post back the results here.

 

You might be lucky and be in a under utilized area but it is best to check your line before moving on.

[ColonicBoom]

Thanks, I'll try that pingplotter tomorrow, although I don't really play at peak time so would I be best to check at the time I usually play at?

 

Is the Netduma's 'Internet Diagnosis' not reliable? It says jitter is 'exceptional'.

 

J

[ColonicBoom]

I have Device Priority set at the default anyway, shared equally and sharing excess, but I'd still like someone to confirm that Device Priority is basically broken as it appears to lay waste to up to half of my bandwidth if I even attempt to prioritise.

 

J

[ColonicBoom]

I have enabled UPnP now and will see if that makes any difference.

 

I've found two UPnP settings though, one in Settings and one in Miscellaneous Settings...

 

Enabled them both.

[ColonicBoom]

UPnP gives me an open NAT, so I've deleted the Port-Forwarding rules as suggested.

Games are still shocking though but it's getting late now.

 

I left my computer running a ping test to 8.8.8.8 through the command line (only device on network) 2ms to 3ms max variance between pings - it gave pretty much exactly the same result as the 'Internet Diagnostics' gave but over a good 30mins.

 

It's hard to judge the ping in games because the ping graph doesn't load most of the time and when it does it disappears after a few seconds.

[ColonicBoom]

Nope, this is awful.

I can barely break even on BO3 with this setup - massive ping spikes are crushing me too.

Someone please give me a hand and tell me what's going on.

[Netduma Fraser]

Hey welcome to the forum, that has got to be the longest support post I think I've ever seen haha.

 

So you mentioned a lot of stuff there so I'll try my best to advise based on the issues you're having. 

 

It seems like you're just using UPnP now which is what we recommend. No need to have it enabled in misc settings so you can disable that. 

 

Are you playing through ethernet to your console? I may have missed it in your post. If you're not would definitely recommend that. 

 

Are you using anti-flood at 70/70 when gaming? Some people find the game plays better on the opposite algorithm to what they use for full speeds so you could try preemptive in your case. 

 

Have you got the XBL services selected in Hyper traffic & Geo-filtering rather than ports?

 

I think the best thing would be if you could provide us with the screenshots from here http://wiki.netduma.com/doku.php?id=lag_support_instructionsas well as the fact it will be much easier to visualise given the amount of text in your post so we don't miss anything.

[ColonicBoom]

Cheers Fraser,

 

Yep, I know it was an epic - I suffered some serious tl;dr shame when I looked at it after I posted

Pleased to achieve the 'longest support post award' though.

Here's a less epic but not short update on the situation.

 

After the BO3 server shambles came back and booted me off this evening I decided to start again - all the way back from the hole in the wall...

 

I disassembled my network piece by piece until everything was disconnected from everything else basically.

Factory reset my Netduma (I now see that it still retained my custom profiles though, which is odd? But I've deleted them too now)

Factory reset my Virgin SuperCrap Hub

Left everything off for a while and wept over a cup of tea and a bakewell tart.

Replaced the network cables that were any part of the direct route to the Duma + Xbox One.

 

Set up my Superhub from default, didn't mess with anything except for a couple of the security settings and put it in 'Anti-Crap mode' (modem mode).

Set up the Netduma as the primary router and set it up as per the wiki and a few forum posts that suggest disabling IPv6 / Deep Packet / etc. Think I've read almost every forum post over the long weekend.

No unsanctioned deviations this time, everything to the letter, including UPnP (but not UPnP forwarding now I know what it is) much as it pains me not to use manual port forward

Set up the Asus for wifi (Access Point mode), disabled the wifi on the Netduma to avoid a clusterfudge again.

Rebooted everything again and reattached all my devices to the network.

Everything that can and should be connected by ethernet is, Xbox One, Asus Dark Knight, AppleTV, Tivo, the only devices using wifi are the usual, laptops, tablets, phones, etc.

And I reserved the DHCP numbers for the Xbox One and the Asus (don't know if that's required but it seemed sensible).

 

Now, what with BO3 being an absolute bum-fest at the moment (and it being 2am) I haven't tried it out since this rebuild.

I'll have a play tomorrow evening but I don't think I will even be able to tell if there's a problem my end that needs trouble-shooting or if it's simply the servers / game.

 

Feel free to close this thread if you want and if there seems to be any issues I can raise them one at a time, which will probably be easier for everyone to look at, rather than in a massive info splurge like I did with this thread.

 

J

[Netduma Fraser]

I'll leave the thread open for now so you can update us with any questions you may have

[ColonicBoom]

Ok, question the first...

 

I've played one game so not much to base on yet but immediately I got my 2+kd back - happy days.

But I won't rejoice yet as it's only one game.

 

Host-Filter: 2 snap clicks + PA 32ms.

 

Majority in France, one in deepest Spain, one across in Poland possibly Belarus and then 3 in the UK and 1 in Ireland (the host).

I don't care where the people I slaughter are to be honest as long as they aren't lagging and for they were dying nicely.

They weren't lagging. I wasn't stuttering. Hit detection was so good it was arousing.

I felt like I died when I should have because I'm out of practice and they died when they should have because they were rubbish at aiming.

 

But my ping graph still took 4 minutes to load and then promptly went back to the loading animation...

Anything I can do about that? Because I'd like to know before the game preferably or at least at the beginning of the game - I could work out the connection myself by then anyway.

Was doing this pretty much every game before I rebuilt the network last night as well.

 

Ta very much gents.

[ColonicBoom]

Mmmm, 3kd.

 

A few laggers though and it says the server was 3500miles away.

Enabled strict, don't know if that makes a difference (don't know why it wasn't enabled either).

 

But my ping graph (and the ping value) just don't seem to load.

It did pop up 10 seconds in for a split second and then was gone, then came back after 2 mins but gone in an instant again, then it didn't come back for another few minutes. It never stayed for more than a second at any point until the game ended. As soon as the game ended the ping graph loaded and stayed on display.

It's not just the graph by the way, as soon as the graph disappears the ping value stops updating too.

[iAmMoDBoX]

Mmmm, 3kd.

 

A few laggers though and it says the server was 3500miles away.

Enabled strict, don't know if that makes a difference (don't know why it wasn't enabled either).

 

But my ping graph (and the ping value) just don't seem to load.

It did pop up 10 seconds in for a split second and then was gone, then came back after 2 mins but gone in an instant again, then it didn't come back for another few minutes. It never stayed for more than a second at any point until the game ended. As soon as the game ended the ping graph loaded and stayed on display.

It's not just the graph by the way, as soon as the graph disappears the ping value stops updating too.

 

What browser are you looking at the graph in?

[Netduma Fraser]

Sounds like it's much improved! Please follow this guide for the ping issue http://wiki.netduma.com/doku.php?id=why_can_t_i_ping

[ColonicBoom]

What browser are you looking at the graph in?

 

i'm using Safari at this moment but I was using Chrome when I posted that - they both function the same

[ColonicBoom]

Sounds like it's much improved! Please follow this guide for the ping issue http://wiki.netduma.com/doku.php?id=why_can_t_i_ping

 

Definite improvement immediately.

 

But VPN is all deselected and disabled (I don't have VPN anyway).

I'm on a Mac, so I haven't bothered with any anti-virus, and Ad-Blocker is already disabled on Safari - unless there's one built into Chrome, I haven't got any in the extensions.

 

Have got a firewall though, is there any way I can disable it only for that rather than completely? (I don't know much about it to be honest)

[ColonicBoom]

Turned off the firewall completely (is that ok?)

Deleted ad-blocker from safari.

Ping popped up every 30 or so seconds but was gone in an instant, it finally settled 6mins into the game and stayed for 1:30 but was then gone again until the end.

Can't get it to settle at all with Chrome - definitely no ad-blocker in extensions there either.

 

Any other ideas?

[ColonicBoom]

ok, so for one game it stayed for the whole game but it's hit and miss and the majority of games it's loading for a lot more of the game than it's actually visible

[Netduma Fraser]

Strange okay, can you post here please after reading the pinned thread and I can take a look http://forum.netduma.com/forum/66-request-1-on-1/

[ColonicBoom]

Strange okay, can you post here please after reading the pinned thread and I can take a look http://forum.netduma.com/forum/66-request-1-on-1/

 

Will do, I've just thought though...

 

My laptop is wirelessly running the Netduma page and thus ping graph, because I don't have any free ethernet ports left (and Mac laptops tend not to have ethernet ports - mine doesn't), is this likely to be causing it before I trouble you further?

[Netduma Fraser]

It shouldn't do. I use a Mac with wifi as well and don't have that issue.