Ping Rate Question

[DeltaFox]

Hi,

I currently have an arenas' view of a 47 ping rate, all arenas.

I used to run ballpark 78 usually.  It has been to 125.

What is considered a good ping rate and why?

Is ping rate dependent on various reasons or a specific reason?  Does it reflect the nature of the Internet load at the time?  Other reasons?

(How I feel about my forum questions are, if they are not suitable or whatever, pull the post if you deem it necessary.  I am sure a search will suffice, I suppose.)

[The Fugitive]

Anything under 500 is good. The more important thing is a steady connection. If your ping is jumping all over the place 50-1000 your going to see some odds stuff. Your ping will change each and everyday, it's the nature of the internet. Some days the internet is real busy (election time gets bad) and pings go higher, other days it's quite and and your lower.  If your connection gets bad the game will try to switch you to UDP protocols to try and keep your connection. You will get a message on the text if it does this.

[DeltaFox]

See:

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,68316.0.html


I used to get packet loss, "Losing UDP, switch to TCP" (I think that is it) and would lose the host.  That mostly stopped when I quit using the integrated video card in my old computer.

My new computer has integrated Ethernet "cards" and outlet port on the motherboard that must be doing a better job.  The video card is PCI-e.

I still lose host, and I bet it is some process firing off in the background.

I think 47 is a good number...

(This post may get posted twice, sorry.)

[Tigger29]

47 is an excellent number.

Even 147 would be good, but what is especially important is that this number is consistent.

If it jumps around from 47, to 120, to 24, to 231, to 75... this is going to be a problem and other people will see you 'warping' back and forth.  Having a consistent 400 is better than the example I gave there.

UDP and TCP are two different networking protocols.  It would take too long and be too hard to explain what this means, but in a nutshell UDP is faster, more efficient, and uses less overhead than TCP.  Compare this to baseball:  Right fielder throws ball to first baseman.  The drawback is there is no error-checking built into this, which means that the right fielder can't see the first baseman, and vice versa... so someone could stop the ball half way and substitute it for a different ball (or even throw it away altogether) and neither player would be any more wiser.

TCP on the other hand is slower, less efficient, and uses a LOT more overhead.  Same baseball example, except the right fielder has to first show the ball to an umpire who then has to call the first baseman to let him know the ball is on the way.  Then the ball gets thrown.  Then another umpire examines the ball to make sure it's the same ball... then he hands the ball to the first baseman... and then he calls the right fielder to let him know that they got the ball intact.  If something is wrong, then the first baseman has to ask for the right fielder to throw it again.

Because of this, UDP can't handle any packet loss at all, and if any of this is detected it switches over to TCP which can tolerate a bit more abuse... the drawback is lag (due to having to resend lost packets), 'rubber bullets', and anything that is 'time sensitive', such as aiming for the right wing of an enemy... becomes much more difficult.  People usually don't get to fly with TCP for very long, as if their connection is too poor to support UDP.. then it's probably not going to support TCP either.

Basically, when you get that message.. it means land your perked ride because likely you only have a few seconds before you get disconnected altogether.  I have gotten lucky in the past though... lost UDP during FSO but finishing out the night on TCP...  Luckily the networks out here are stable enough to where this isn't often an issue.

[dmdchief]

Your video card has nothing to do with your ping rate.  This is totally network controlled, by determining how many hops the network takes between you and Aces High server and back again.  Scuzzy has said repeatedly that anything below 350 is golden

salute
Frank Williams
ab8aac out

[Ghastly]

Your video card has nothing to do with your ping rate.  This is totally network controlled, by determining how many hops the network takes between you and Aces High server and back again.  Scuzzy has said repeatedly that anything below 350 is golden

salute
Frank Williams
ab8aac out

Except that under certain conditions poorly designed hardware and more often, drivers, can impact areas that they shouldn't. If a poorly implemented video driver is constantly interrupted processing of network packets, it could easily cause what he described, even though generally they would be completely unrelated.  Obviously, this kind of thing tends to happen but rarely and when it does it's usually very much incident specific - but it can happen.

I once had a Number 9 video card that prevented the machine it was installed in from successfully using a modem on Com1: to transfer a file to a host system - and it took a long while to determine that the video card was the root cause of the intermittent problem just because it was so bizarre.

<S>

[bustr]

I had a Number 9 video card in the SVGA Air Warrior days. It was the only card the game would detect on startup, play for an hour, then the monitor screen turned into 16 littel screens. Each screen was of some view angle inside the cockpit.