Aces High Bulletin Board
Special Events Forums => Friday Squad Operations => Topic started by: Raubvogel on July 12, 2002, 11:05:46 PM
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but the horrendous lag is killing it. TOD is probably one of the best things about AH, but this week was an exercise in futility...
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I agree with Raub...
TOD is what gets my blood pumping...nothing else compares to it
BUT the lack of bandwidth is really killing most of the fun
[edit] Be advised...rhetorical questions ahead: Why fly a one death event when the lag is unmanageble?
I'm not trying to be....oh god here it comes....WHINY
But... it is frustrating to look forward for a weekly event and have it (when less than 150 people?) turn into a lag fest.
I salute the effort of all those to setup and manage TOD but hopefully the TOD can get a bit more bandwidth...otherwise it may not be worth playing
Just a rhetorical question....okay, I'll go back to drinking now.
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I encountered something I've never seen before. A few of us Mongrels CTD's when jumping to OTR. Upon coming back in, we were stuck in "Limbo." All my text channels were set to All and my V ch was reset to 101. There was nothing scrolling by in the text and I couldn't move to any other base on the map or change any radio ch. After a bit, I started hearing others on ch 101 who were in Limbo too. I would exit the arena to come back with no results. After several minutes, it finally hicupped and then all my radio channels were back to normal and I could find the CV on the map and launch. Weird.
TODs are indeed the best thing about Aces High.
Hmm, Friday night in USA and I am wondering if large groups of people happened to be downloading the patch while TOD was taking place.
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half of my guys got stuck in the "nether" world and coudnt spawn. They just left after 15 min of tryin.
I hate to say it but the connections (or lag or somethin) aint right in the SEA. We had relatively lag free events. It was bad in the last one and in BoB. It was almost unaccptable tonight.
Still had an awesome time but man what coulda been :)
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How about this?
add 30 min to the end of the frame.
for the 1st 30 min set the fuel mod to its lowest setting let 1 squad at a time up and get away from the cv before the next group ups.
the side co can set up who rolls when.
at t + 30 everyone needs to be up.
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The US side DID have a Staggered Start.
Even then it took agood 15 mins to get the TEXT LAGS down.
Once we were all up it seemed to settle down till about 12:30 AM when I and others got dumped.
Jordi
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I got caught in the nether area for a while. I'd been having some issues with the non-MA areas so I started ping tool in the background and my hop between #11 & #12 was showing 100 to 500 ms jumps, bouncing all over the place [had screenshot of pingtool, but lost it before I could save it]. Below is a snippet of my current (after event) pingtool hops. Don't know what happened, but earlier tonight, the link from usdlls.savvis.net to htc2 was terrible. This was also the first night I have experienced considerable packet loss.
Target Name: htc2.hitechcreations.com
IP: 216.91.192.20
Date/Time: 7/13/2002 12:55:45 AM
9 82 ms 83 ms 96 ms 82 ms sl-savvis-2-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.194.14]
10 82 ms 82 ms 82 ms 82 ms savvis-internet.cntx04.usdlls2-bsn.savvis.net [64.241.96.94]
11 96 ms 96 ms 83 ms 83 ms applink-1.usdlls.savvis.net [216.90.2.66]
12 96 ms 82 ms 96 ms 82 ms htc2.hitechcreations.com [216.91.192.20]
After the initial problems (2 CTD, 1 freeze, & 2-5 entries into the SEA) I was able to get my Val up. Once flying, things seemed to be fine.
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we did stagger our start in didnt help.
I dont mean just stagger. I mean give time for the group that just upped to get clear. Then each squad member roll 1 at a time.
Its a bit extreme but I need to relay something to my squad. They have a low tolerance for bs :)
We need more then a 3 min stagger.
The SEA connection has gone to crap theres terrible lag even when we all dont spawn in 1 spot.
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I noticed terrible lag and warpiness in the MA shortly before I logged for bed at 2.00 am my time (9.00 pm Eastern). A few times I found myself in the "twilight zone" hanging around with the sheep! :) I put it all down to people downloading the patch, especially as it was approaching peak time in the US, and it was unfortunate that the patch came so soon before the Friday TOD.... must have been very frustrating.
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Im sure the patch downloads didnt help, thats for sure. Things were not too bad after we got airborne for @ 10 min or so.
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Interesting downward spiral here:
Text lag keeps people from using text*
People start using VOX exclusively
Vox causes greater Text lag
Text lag keeps people from using text
People start using VOX exclusively
Vox causes greater Text lag
Text lag keeps people from using text
People start using VOX exclusively
Vox causes greater Text lag
Text lag keeps people from using text
People start using VOX exclusively
Vox causes greater Text lag
-Sikboy
*These statements have not be verified by the FDA
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I will be whiny then.... This problem has been going on since 1.10 arrived. If it dont work revert back to 1.09 and fix 1.10. Most people dont want to pay to be beta testers.
Last nights TOD frame was unacceptable and unplayable. If my wife acted so poorly I'd divorce her.
A very unpleasant experience!
JokerI'm not trying to be....oh god here it comes....WHINY
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Just to let everyone know daddog and sling will be passing on things to HiTech. Last night probably was a combination of several things and it will take for them to look into each and check out all the variables and then fix it.
[list=1]
- It could be something with the code for 1.10. It might not be .. will take a little bit of time for them to do some investigation in this area. This is possible since people have said MA has been a bit sluggish also.
- It could be a bandwidth thing. Again they will be checking into this. I don't personally know their setup but its possible that 190 - 200 pilots are pushing the allocated bandwidth for SEA to the max. However, I don't know if SEA is on a seperate pipe or on the same pipe as the other arenas.
- It could be a server issue. I have notice in MA when you come within 50 of maxing out the arena it starts to get funky. Last night we at first came very close to hitting 200 people in SEA. 189 actually tried to launch last night (and then there was me sitting on sidelines). So we came close to maxing out the arena.
Now outside of these issues there are several specific things done in TOD that causes a massive server hit and FE hit on your machines side.
- A large number of planes spawning and upping at the same time will cause a server hit. This usually doesn't happen in the MA because people log on when they get there. They don't all wait to up in a mass of planes.
Now even with rolling starts we were still probably having something like 40 or more trying to up at the exact same time. And then while they were upping and forming up another large group spawning. This probably cause the system resources on the SEA server to spike in several successions.
- On your computer FE side upping all from one location probably through it into fits trying to interpret 40 - 90 planes worth information in a small area.
So Nifty and I discussed and Sling and Daddog and Skernsk on CM's boards and others and there are several things we are going to try to manage system resource spikes on the server.
- First we will make sure to have several launch CVs instead of just one. Then the other launch CVs (the non target ones) will then be moved out of the combat area after everyone ups.
- Two we might more formalize launch groups. Meaning I will call out for GROUP 1 GO GO GO. Then wait a set time to make sure everyone is up and has some seperation from field and then call GROUP 2 GO GO GO.
What this should accomplish is to better break up the number of people spawning at the same time and try to better prevent the server from spiking.
Basically we have say 3 to 4 smaller spikes / request for system resouces caused by planes spawning. Instead of 1 long extended spike. Also by seperating out the groups a bit we prevent your FE from spike try to interpet all the data for X many planes.
This is an idea I just had and will submit to other CMs.
- Lastly we need to prevent downloads happening at the beginning of the frame. Obviously nothing could be done about last nights update patch. But when we switch to a new map it become critical for everyone to download it before TOD. Several TODs in the past had first frames that were attrocious because of downloading maps and then the second and third frame were better.
But as I said these are just things to try to minimize the SEA starting to max out.
Now and before people start getting on a rant for HiTech to increase the server capacity and bandwidth as far as I know they might be doing that. However, remember guys a new server costs money .. they might be looking into a new server or maybe they just need to re-allocate resources on the current server.
We ran into similiar problems over in AW when the Scenarios server basically maxed out. Over there we (the participants) had a talk about actually pitching in like $10 each to get a new server. Before we start a rant here about equipment and such and needing to increase it .. would the TOD community and Scenario community consider offering a one time charge say like $10 - $20 toward a SEA seperate server or so? Just a thought and its my own thought not something from the other CMs or HiTech.
Oh, and I do know its in HiTech's plans to increase the capacity of the SEA. Just don't know when. The above is just something to consider and in no way means HiTech is having problems covering equipment costs. Its just stems from my AW days when we all talked about pitching in to get a seperate server for our scenarios.
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Yeah, it was very frustrating - took me forever to spawn.
Then when we found the enemy, I would close on a bad guy only to have him warp 2k away when I was about to open fire. With all the jumpiness, I shot off a lot of worthless ammo.
I'd have to say my FAVORITE part was the F4F I was on warped onto my 6.
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Originally posted by Kratzer
... I'd have to say my FAVORITE part was the F4F I was on warped onto my 6...
Hey, that wasn't a warp, that was the new blink, jink and roll maneuver ;).
Cya Up!
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I'm convinced the problem is the SEA connection itself. The mass takeoffs don't help, but several minutes after everyone had taken off from the CVs, I was still seeing this:
--- beta.hitechcreations.com ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 49 packets received, 2% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 130.156/713.067/2889.394/695.884 ms
As a result, the 56th FG went and flew in the MA, where despite having almost 3 times the players, I still managed a steady 35ms ping. Maybe HTC should host the SEA on the same server as the MA.
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I think That it is Bandwith causing all the problems
Why dont we shut down Da or CA and pump that extra bandwith to Sea ?? If it is possibl
I agree that something needs to be done soon all that prep for lag ... How is this gonna play out in BOB ??
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Poorly, BOB will most likly be bigger than your average weekly TOD
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Well they have a MONTH to find and fix the problems !
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I tend to side with Ghostdancer in thinking that the problem is the new netcode.
HTC have said they've changed the netcode in several ways to favour things like nearby enemies. I've seen the SEA full before and I doubt they've actually dialled back the bandwidth, yet nothing like this has ever happened before.
My ping times tripled or quadrupled during the problems. When I went and checked the SEA later in the event (40 ppl left) ping times were back to normal.
Heres my 'guess':
The beginning of each ToD has always been riddled with warps, as squads launch, the text channels fill, and the voice channels fill too. After a few minutes this calms down and the ToD goes on normally. Because its the beginning of the frame and no one has engaged yet the warps only screw up formations initially.
So we all roll... whammo, 200 plays suddenly get 'warpy'.
Next, the new netcode steps up, sees the 'warps' and decides everyone is lagging. It decides to switch all 200 players over to TCP mode from UDP mode.
200 players switching from TCP to UDP mode screws over the server something chronic. Some of us log, and eventually relog in. Those that stayed end up with TCP connections that are ok, but slightly laggy/warpy.
It was interesting to note that voice comms stayed ok during the whole fiasco, albeit a little choppy. Which would tend to indicate the bandwidth was ok.
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Originally posted by Sikboy
*These statements have not be verified by the FDA
Mr. SikBoy, this is the FBI... are you there?
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Ghostdancer, I like your ideas for dealing with the lag in the SEA. Our squad was new to the TOD (sorry for any etiquette/protocol violations) and thought that the lag might be normal. The biggest mystery was knowing when to launch even though we knew to launch at T+2 min. At about +9 min, we still had not seen any other AK's launch (I believe they were to launch before us) so we launched anyway. We were a small group and cleared the area quickly, but it would be nice to have a verbal launch command to eliminate the confusion. Also, separate Launch CV's would be a great idea.
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Biggest problem I saw was everyone trying to launch at the same time. We learned from that long ago and set the mission planner so that there are 3-4 separate flights a min or 2 apart. Just a suggestion for next time. Otherwise we all enjoyed the TOD. The TBM's made it all the way to the cv's and dropped but I think we had a bad angle and not all of our torps made it in. We did however have the opportunity to take out several zekes. I was surprised at how well the TBM's could mix it up with them.
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