Preemptive versus Reactive

[RL317]

21 hours ago, Netduma Fraser said:

Yeah it does cover that range but I do remember some users adamant that prioritizing port 3074 for example manually gave them a better experience. If its on the ISP end then yeah it won\t help too much. They probably have a user guide online to help with that. New modem or confront ISP with your captures are probably your best bets for next steps

I've always tried different things after reading people swear by finding a CC "sweet spot" (ie not something that simply reduces latency increases under load but a magic number that gives them amazing hit detection, which I tried myself out of pure frustration) or single port rules with hyper lane but I never saw a difference with any of them... and believe me, I've tried hundreds of different suggestions 😂 I even tried A7Legit's entire setup as he was adamant a couple of single hyper lane rules was the biggest factor in getting good connections. But like I said, if the problem occurs before it gets to my modem then I guess nothing would work. All I can do is stop additional lag created on my end by suppressing congestion and whatnot. 

Some of the best connections I've had have been while not playing on the nearest server, not using QoS, not using hyper lane or some combination of all three, so that's obviously a case of the line working well as standard and using those features would have probably helped improve things further, but when it's bad nothing makes a difference. 

The latest thing I've tried is changing the 802.1p WAN setting on the HG612 modem as apparently it's a form of QoS (or is it CoS?) that affects traffic and the priority placed on it. For example on TalkTalk it's been recommended to use 0, 1 or 2. I found this interesting post written by the owner of the Kitz forum - who actually helped TP Link develop their auto setup process for VDSL2 modems by experimenting with 802.1p with his own unusual setup - after a TalkTalk user asked for help in identifying the optimal setting for fibre:

"About a month or so later they were contacted by a TalkTalk customer saying it wouldnt work... so they tried [1] which did. Shortly after someone on BT also found they needed to use [1].

"[2] continued to work fine for me for nrly 2 yrs - until I got a chromecast which suddenly wouldnt stream content correctly until I changed 2 to 1.

I therefore suspect the priority 1 is needed if you stream IPTV content. That would explain why some people on BT and TT say either, but some say [1] if they have say TalkTalk TV or BT TV/Sport.

I'm talking off the top of my head here (and memory which may not be 100% correct), but I believe Openreach use different channels for sending different types of data. [ETA - I see ejs has added the links whilst I was typing]

IPTV is given higher priority by Openreach therefore if we set normal data as highest priority when using other services then things start to break. By using [1] we are allocating Best Effort to normal data and allowing other services such as IPTV priority.

IMHO if you use any of the priority services, then you should use [1] rather than [ 0], but zero should still work."

I thought it seemed logical to try all of these different settings but I've seen no difference, except for strange thinkbroadband monitor plots if I use above 2 (max spikes of 30ms going up to 180ms). Sometimes I wish I was easily susceptible to the placebo effect LOL

[Netduma Fraser]

Damn, that's a shame, in another post you changed the R1 LAN IP, has that had an affect at all on the connection? Might just be worth seeing if you can get a cheap modem and try within its return period to see if it performs any better

[N3CR0]

On 11/21/2018 at 6:32 PM, Dan said:

Dang!

My PS4 pro can get a bit spassy in offline mode if too many boys are added but nothing like that. Perhaps it's a combination of your boiler firing up, TV changing channel, door bell ringing and microwave being turned on. Or perhaps the neighbours are secretly fracking.....

Other than that surely that must be packet loss or a hardware issue? 

Been saying this to him for over a year lol. Dude's got problems but after changing ISP, modem and router and even trying to play on Xbox...

I'm all outta ideas tbh.

[RL317]

14 hours ago, Netduma Fraser said:

Damn, that's a shame, in another post you changed the R1 LAN IP, has that had an affect at all on the connection? Might just be worth seeing if you can get a cheap modem and try within its return period to see if it performs any better

After I changed that IP yesterday, I loaded up a custom game (vs bots) and noticed it was performing differently (the hitmarker sounds were strange, but better), and bots no longer had connection icons in killcams lol. I played some games online with tight settings (just home in ocean, 34ms ping assist and strict mode on) and the usual 70% QoS plus classified games traffic prio and the first four games ran perfectly normally - the best connections I've seen since that spell I mentioned on DumaOS (just 10 games that worked well). The first three games were on French and Dutch servers at 14ms (the same 14ms I got hideous lag on before), while the fourth game was on 7ms to the UK and it was the best of the bunch. The fifth game was on 7ms to the UK and it was the worst connection I've had for weeks, which is saying something. It was just pure desync. 

 

I even tried taking my R1 downstairs and placing it close to the HG612 with a short cable (the one that came with the R1), rather than having it upstairs on the end of a 15m CAT6a FTP cable which I've started to think might be the cause of problems itself as I read FTP needs grounding just like STP, and on top of that I had a feeling that the route I ran the cable along placed it close to potential sources of interference behind the wall. But nah, no difference after the first four games. 

 

Maybe the modem is the problem. I mean, the HG612 is seen as the best you can get for performance on Openreach connections but I never had issues like this pre-February 17 when I used a Smart Hub alone. The 10 games I had that worked well a few weeks ago included the TalkTalk Hub (which I heard was terrible) behind the R1, and then some new DumaOS settings. However as you'll remember, I started complaining about packet loss and thought maybe it was the TT Hub at fault (since I saw R1 network diagnostic test packet loss for the first time ever when I first plugged it in after switching from BT). I even changed my DSL cable from a CAT6 twisted pair one to the crappy ribbon cable just to see if my original had been damaged somehow. Funny enough, since swapping those out and then doing the default gateway thing, I've not had hours of packet loss for the first time in weeks:

 

 

You can see the resync early on in the plot, then just a single pixel indicating packet loss for the next 24 hours. I was using the internet heavily yesterday afternoon too (running an Amazon Fire TV, PS4 Remote Play and three game downloads at the same time as I installed an SSD for my PS4) and there was barely any bloat, never mind any packet loss. The title is "reset modem to defaults" after I gave up trying different 802.1p values - it defaults to 2, which Zennon says is standard for TalkTalk anyway I believe. Then I just disabled its QoS and firewall. Maybe something under 2 causes TalkTalk to drop ICMP pings so there's a lot of packet loss but it's basically meaningless, as you'd see on intermediate hops on PingPlotter? I didn't get any packet loss icons in game yesterday or any other day before that while it was appearing on thinkbroadband so that's another question mark filling my brain lol

 

I could try my TP Link modem again as that always worked really well and somehow reduced latency to the same places for the most part. The only problem is I remember trying it out when I first moved to TalkTalk, but I can't remember if it was bridge mode or router mode that didn't work. Bridge mode worked just fine on BT (I'd input my PPPoE details on the R1 WAN tab and voilà) but I don't think I could get a connection in bridge mode on the R1. If memory serves it would be fine plugging the PS4 straight into the modem, but the R1 wouldn't get a connection. You don't even need PPPoE on TalkTalk. I never had that issue using modem mode on the Virgin Media Hub with the R1 😕 not sure if there's some kind of workaround for that... 

[Netduma Admin]

Perhaps give the TalkTalk modem a try and see if that improves things?

[RL317]

10 minutes ago, Netduma Admin said:

Perhaps give the TalkTalk modem a try and see if that improves things?

Yeah I'll probably put it back in tonight. I had more bipolarity today on the same three local servers (all under 15ms). 10 games of desync and impossibilities, then it randomly became amazing (my easiest game was against a two man party of 3KDs who were keyboarding? Lol what), that lasted three or four games, then back to hideous lag again. Naturally the worst connection was in the easiest lobby. It's so so wrong. 

 

It's not like I'm on PC trying to force host. I just want low ping games to be smooth and responsive, and as consistent as they should be when I have record low levels of jitter. I had more consistency on terrible jittery Virgin Media cable 🤔

[NoMoreMyFriend-S]

On 11/22/2018 at 10:15 PM, lllRL said:

I signed up two months ago so no, I just missed it. Typical

 

It's a good 99% of the time, no exaggeration. It'll take me 100 or even more games just to find one on the same server (or even one with a higher ping) that randomly gives me a great connection, and if I'm lucky it'll last two or three games before going back to weeks of nonsense. For the most part I get on expecting the same and just play 15 or 20 minutes before I get off again. If I'm feeling really stubborn (like "why the fuck shouldn't I be allowed to play? I'm gonna sit here for a while") I'll just be testing connections for an hour or more. 

 

I can only think of a few days since February of LAST YEAR where I got more than one smooth responsive game during a session. There was the 8th of March this year (5 solid games, shite the next day), the 21st of April (2 hours of constant good connections, shite the next day), and then a few weeks ago on DumaOS. It was awful to start with, then I tried this new setup messing around with bandwidth allocation to different devices rather than global bandwidth control and I got four smooth games one day on 7ms to the UK server, and the first six games of the next day before it went back to one bar jokes. It's gotten even worse since then.

 

The only other time I've had decent connections in that time was on the 17th and 19th of May this year, where I set my filter in the north of Scotland when connecting to online services and avoided servers, then disabled the geofilter and got player hosted lobbies. In two games I pulled host and it was incredible. In the rest I connected to random hosts around Europe and on anything up to the 60ms I got to a host in Denmark, it played better than 99% of my games on servers, including the UK one at 7ms. I distinctly remember one game where there was a host migration and suddenly there were hexagon (packet loss) icons on screen for a full five minutes, and the connection was still better than most I've played on 7ms. Unfortunately it would take me up to 30 minutes just to get a lobby that was populated enough for me to start a game, so it's not exactly a reliable method of forcing decent games; my attempts to do this in the week following those games all failed to find a game. 

 

This was from 8th of March. My jaw hit the floor when I started playing, and most of my time was spent laughing because it was so unbelievable

Naturally the next day it was back to desync dogshit 🤣 what's really weird is that I'd been using the "typical" R1 setup that day - 70/70 preemptive, CoD Ultimate profile, PSN in hyper lane and auto everything else. That setup had never given me these results before. I've tried literally hundreds of different settings - optimal or otherwise, and tweaked one at a time or as a combo of new settings - and never attributed any brief moments of success to them because those good rare games are truly random. 

 

Actually thinking back to February 2017... I think that's when I got my R1. November 2016 was awful on IW, but December through February were comparatively great (say around a third of games were on great connections) while I was using just my BT Smart Hub. Most would come to the conclusion that the R1 is the problem, yet I've had great games with the R1 too. Clearly my network is capable of giving me these great connections because they do sometimes (well, seldom) appear, and I've spent so long on bad ones I can detect them straight away, in my first gunfight of the game. The problem is there's nothing in my settings that would logically affect my usual connection performance, so I just get on confused and get off confused - whether the game plays well or not. 

You are describing my life with this thread.

no clue why I have lagspikes, most games unplayable on BO4. I have a fiber to the home with 200/50 beside my playstation and r1. And it is frustrating the hell out of me. I spend more time tweaking than playing, e3xchanging cables and devices, hard drives, etc. and still shit results.

R1 original software seems to work better than the Duma OS on R1

but overall, unplayable for me.

about to give up

[Netduma Fraser]

59 minutes ago, NoMoreMyFriend-S said:

You are describing my life with this thread.

no clue why I have lagspikes, most games unplayable on BO4. I have a fiber to the home with 200/50 beside my playstation and r1. And it is frustrating the hell out of me. I spend more time tweaking than playing, e3xchanging cables and devices, hard drives, etc. and still shit results.

R1 original software seems to work better than the Duma OS on R1

but overall, unplayable for me.

about to give up

Have you followed this guide? http://support.netduma.com/en/support/solutions/articles/16000074717-test-your-connection and also tried to force further away servers to see if they play better for you?

[RL317]

5 hours ago, NoMoreMyFriend-S said:

You are describing my life with this thread.

no clue why I have lagspikes, most games unplayable on BO4. I have a fiber to the home with 200/50 beside my playstation and r1. And it is frustrating the hell out of me. I spend more time tweaking than playing, e3xchanging cables and devices, hard drives, etc. and still shit results.

R1 original software seems to work better than the Duma OS on R1

but overall, unplayable for me.

about to give up

I tried again today. Same old nonsense... forced one single server and I got 2 games that were normal in around 2 hours. The weird lag is actually getting worse... it's like playing on a one bar. Had PingPlotter running alongside (obviously my PS4 had the priority with hyper lane) and it was flawless, yet in game I'm getting hitmarkers after turning 180 degrees and running away, dying half a second around corners, and just generally getting joked. 

 

The final straw came when I used this ability called FTL Jump (I don't know if you've played IW but it's like a short burst of super speed where you can fly over/past someone) over someone's head, flicked back on to them instantly on max sensitivity, engaged and got three shots off before dying (with hitmarkers after I died, naturally). The killcam shows a guy from Russia with no quickdraw on his gun, PACKET LOSS ICONS and what looked like 3 sensitivity reacting late, turning and wildly hipfiring with thumb spasm aim. The best part? From his perspective, I turned like a snail. He saw me turning on what looked like 1 sensitivity. On my screen I went over his head at the speed of light and snapped back to start firing at him before he had even turned 90 degrees, and he was firing off to my right hitting me. I was facing him a good half a second before he turned to me, yet on his screen he was the one to turn 180 degrees first on what was a quarter of my sensitivity at most. How many hundreds of milliseconds of lag would there have to be to see that much desync, with that large a discrepancy, while I'm on a 7ms ping to this server? I just don't know anymore... 

[RobReapz]

16 minutes ago, lllRL said:

I tried again today. Same old nonsense... forced one single server and I got 2 games that were normal in around 2 hours. The weird lag is actually getting worse... it's like playing on a one bar. Had PingPlotter running alongside (obviously my PS4 had the priority with hyper lane) and it was flawless, yet in game I'm getting hitmarkers after turning 180 degrees and running away, dying half a second around corners, and just generally getting joked. 

 

The final straw came when I used this ability called FTL Jump (I don't know if you've played IW but it's like a short burst of super speed where you can fly over/past someone) over someone's head, flicked back on to them instantly on max sensitivity, engaged and got three shots off before dying (with hitmarkers after I died, naturally). The killcam shows a guy from Russia with no quickdraw on his gun, PACKET LOSS ICONS and what looked like 3 sensitivity reacting late, turning and wildly hipfiring with thumb spasm aim. The best part? From his perspective, I turned like a snail. He saw me turning on what looked like 1 sensitivity. On my screen I went over his head at the speed of light and snapped back to start firing at him before he had even turned 90 degrees, and he was firing off to my right hitting me. I was facing him a good half a second before he turned to me, yet on his screen he was the one to turn 180 degrees first on what was a quarter of my sensitivity at most. How many hundreds of milliseconds of lag would there have to be to see that much desync, with that large a discrepancy, while I'm on a 7ms ping to this server? I just don't know anymore... 

You need to give up on the low ping uk servers unless you want to VPN your connection to somewhere in eastern Europe then force the UK server with the geofilter lol

[Stealth_01]

3 hours ago, RobReapz said:

You need to give up on the low ping uk servers unless you want to VPN your connection to somewhere in eastern Europe then force the UK server with the geofilter lol

How'd that work out for u fella? Did u get good results??

[RL317]

20 hours ago, RobReapz said:

You need to give up on the low ping uk servers unless you want to VPN your connection to somewhere in eastern Europe then force the UK server with the geofilter lol

I upgraded back to DumaOS today and my first game on 7ms was crispy lol. I don't know what's happening anymore 😭

[NoMoreMyFriend-S]

On 1/12/2019 at 9:18 PM, Netduma Fraser said:

Have you followed this guide? http://support.netduma.com/en/support/solutions/articles/16000074717-test-your-connection and also tried to force further away servers to see if they play better for you?

Tried today and this is the result under no load.

https://share.pingplotter.com/Ni6hWgqw2kp.png

even under full load with watching youtube at 720 and a tv show on fire stick there was marginally more going on.

switched off gerofilter an ping assist. got onto a servier in EUrope (I am based in BKK and usually try to play on Singapore server).  102 ms ping to server and game much better, but overall not able to finish a game since the server kicks me off.

I have a new cable from R1 to ISP modem. Cat 7, 25 cm long  10 inch?

i guess it is not my ISP, it is just th egame and game servers that are shit (BO4)

[NoMoreMyFriend-S]

On 1/13/2019 at 1:53 AM, lllRL said:

I tried again today. Same old nonsense... forced one single server and I got 2 games that were normal in around 2 hours. The weird lag is actually getting worse... it's like playing on a one bar. Had PingPlotter running alongside (obviously my PS4 had the priority with hyper lane) and it was flawless, yet in game I'm getting hitmarkers after turning 180 degrees and running away, dying half a second around corners, and just generally getting joked. 

 

The final straw came when I used this ability called FTL Jump (I don't know if you've played IW but it's like a short burst of super speed where you can fly over/past someone) over someone's head, flicked back on to them instantly on max sensitivity, engaged and got three shots off before dying (with hitmarkers after I died, naturally). The killcam shows a guy from Russia with no quickdraw on his gun, PACKET LOSS ICONS and what looked like 3 sensitivity reacting late, turning and wildly hipfiring with thumb spasm aim. The best part? From his perspective, I turned like a snail. He saw me turning on what looked like 1 sensitivity. On my screen I went over his head at the speed of light and snapped back to start firing at him before he had even turned 90 degrees, and he was firing off to my right hitting me. I was facing him a good half a second before he turned to me, yet on his screen he was the one to turn 180 degrees first on what was a quarter of my sensitivity at most. How many hundreds of milliseconds of lag would there have to be to see that much desync, with that large a discrepancy, while I'm on a 7ms ping to this server? I just don't know anymore... 

played teh shit out of IW before I moved to Thailand. From here you connected to servers in Japan or Australia, same for WW2. It was a drama. BUT: still more consistant than the shite I face with BO$ having a server right in front of me in Singapore (27-32 ms, instead of 120+). I guess the game code is just shite and too many folks in the area connecting from their McDonalds hotspot....

 

[RobReapz]

On 1/12/2019 at 10:54 PM, Stealth_01 said:

How'd that work out for u fella? Did u get good results??

I would never dream of going to such lengths to achieve a fair connection lol (however initial testing went well 😀). I have not done much testing with the latest cod tho as i dont game much these days mate because it simply isnt enjoyable anymore with all the bullshit that goes on plus the poor game design.

[EldestTheGreat]

On 11/21/2018 at 4:20 AM, lllRL said:

This is a great question. I've always wondered if the algorithm should be chosen after you've adjusted your sliders (even though I'm on DumaOS now) especially if 70/70 would take you below 50Mb.

 

I noticed some discrepancies between the two with testing. For example reactive will cause anything lower than 100% CC to show packet loss on DSLReports, while preemptive would always shows 0.0% packet loss without fail. On the other hand a jitter test would show less variance using reactive while your connection is actually under load. However neither algorithm seemed to make a difference to connection quality in game, so I never really knew what to go for. 

Quick comment, I've got 50 down and 5 up and although I let it auto configure, I disabled all misc settings except the cloud stuff, set it to reactive, put the sliders at 70%, hyper trafficked the ps4 AND I've had 0 packet loss. Ive done many network diagnostic tests and I always have 21 ping to google, exceptional jitter, exceptional spikes and no loss. The only time I ever had packet loss was when I used the sb6190 with the broken puma chip. From what I've heard, Duma OS doesn't perform as well on the original r1 router. In terms of in game opinions, I've had more than a few say preemptive back in the day would cause hit detection to be hit or miss. But it does seem like reactive let's things flow more smoothly. Now, if a person only had 20mbps to work with then I'd probably just keep it on reactive and use dslreports to find optimum Upload and download bandwidth settings, put my console in the hyper lane, and just roll with it like that.