Zugg Software :: View topic

Wizard Joined: 17 Jun 2006 Posts: 1201

Sorry to be off topic, but I'm not sure if Cmud is causing any part of this or not.

When I ping through Command Prompt I get the following results.

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 178ms, Maximum = 205ms, Average = 187ms

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 178ms, Maximum = 183ms, Average = 179ms

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 179ms, Maximum = 184ms, Average = 181ms

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 180ms, Maximum = 198ms, Average = 186ms

I have 0 loss on all of those.

In the game though my response times are jumping all over the place and sometimes jumping up to 2000ms.

3500h, 3835m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 303 ms
3500h, 3835m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 258 ms
3500h, 3850m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 880 ms
3500h, 3850m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 255 ms
3500h, 3850m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 853 ms
3500h, 3850m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 317 ms
3500h, 3850m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 241 ms
3500h, 3835m cexkdb-

You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 638 ms
3500h, 3791m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 529 ms
3500h, 3850m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 255 ms
3500h, 3850m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 413 ms
3500h, 3850m cexkdb-
You look about yourself, rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
Response time is currently 256 ms
3500h, 3850m cexkdb-

I'm just calculating time from sending of command to response received. Why is there such a big difference? I realize processing time on their end but is any of it on my end? Surely it doesn't take like up to 2 seconds. I'm always having latency problems but my ping always shows otherwise.

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 10:36 am

Possibly their server is overloaded. Possibly the ping command isn't giving you an accurate representation of normal use (because it only sends 4 packets in quick succession). Possibly stuff is happening in your scripts before the command is sent. There're so many things that can cause lag, it's hard to pin down :(

Wizard Joined: 17 Jun 2006 Posts: 1201

No not my scripts and certainly not that one...I tried disabling everything. The Mud is Achaea by the way and at the time it was pretty dead and is never overloaded like it used to be. It just takes that long for responses. I think it is something to do with their end, but since my ping isn't 50ms like everyone else I always think it is me. It just didn't make sense to me though because my ping is showing steady with a good connection or at least as good as I can get.

The only thing I am sending is the word "chin" with sendraw.

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 12:30 pm

It could be all sorts of things. Perhaps they have their servers behind a router and the ping is being returned by that router, not by the server, and the lag is based in the network beyond that router. Lots of networks do that so they can safely throw out repeat requests and try to avoid DDoS attacks.

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 5:03 pm

The Ping command in the command prompt is using a completely different network protocol than what you are doing in CMUD. The command prompt Ping program using something called ICMP which is a low-level network protocol for performing ping tests (and trace route). It is handled in the lowest level part of the network, usually by the network hardware itself. So even if the server is really busy, you can still usually get a good ping time. Ping was meant to measure network latency and not server load.

When performing the timing tests in CMUD, you are waiting until the MUD server receives your command, parses it, decides what to do with it, and then sends a response. This can be heavily impacted by the load on the server. Achaea is a popular MUD server and always has players on it. As Fang mentioned, there are so many things that could cause this it's almost impossible to pin down the cause. And who knows how there server is configured and whether the server is shared among other games or other systems. With virtual machine technology these days, it's becoming more common to see multiple servers sharing the same hardware. If the server requires any sort of database query before it sends your response, then the details of their database server also come into play. I've even seem some MUDs that have minimum response time features that prevents the MUD server from instantly responding to any command to prevent spamming.

As far as a 2-second lag, that long kind of lag can happen if only a *single* packet is lost on the network. If Windows doesn't receive a response to a packet, it has a built-in timeout that is several seconds before it resends the packet. The way to look for this kind of problem is to run PING in a command prompt *continuously* and look for *any* packet loss. Any packet loss, even a small amount, can result in these kind of long delays with Windows.

Then there is all sorts of TCP/IP tuning parameters within your own Windows network software. As I mentioned, PING doesn't use the same protocol as Telnet. PING is using ICMP, which is very low level. It doesn't use the full TCP/IP stack. Telnet uses the full TCP/IP stack, and there are various things that can be changed in Windows, especially in Vista. Take a look at the CMUD Vista trouble shooting topic in the help system for a command that can turn off part of the TCP/IP tuning.

Finally, you can always test this on different MUDs to see how your results might vary from MUD to MUD. This will tell you how much is MUD dependent and how much is your network connection. Try the same test in zMUD to compare zMUD with CMUD to see if it's a client issue (or some other client).

Just remember that MUDs use the Telnet protocol, which requires a constantly connected network socket. Most other Internet use (web surfing, email, file transfer, etc) doesn't require that sort of network connection anymore. This makes Telnet the most sensitive to any sort of network issue. Routers are being optimized for web surfing traffic, and not for Telnet traffic these days.

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:55 am

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:19 pm

Does DoctorZ even work properly on WinXP or Vista? I stopped working on it long ago when XP came out because it seemed to have a lot of problems with the changes in the WinXP ICMP library. Kind of cool to hear that someone is still using it! Maybe I need to add it back to the product listing? I'm just worried about adding more support work to my already overloaded schedule.

Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 1:27 pm

It works properly on xp.. at least for me it has.

No idea about Vista.

Its probably not worth putting time into as a product of its own, since its something that hopefully only gets rarely used (i.e. when the user has a problem) but if its actually functional on vista it may be a good promotional tool.

Apprentice Joined: 03 Feb 2007 Posts: 170

Never used DoctorZ but downloaded it a minute ago to check and I would bet money it works on Vista as it works on Win 7 x64 with only one oddity. When I'd click the X the program would only minimize, not close. In task Manager telling it to End Task wouldn't close it either, telling it to end its process tree worked though.

Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 5:15 pm

Look in the File menu...there should be an option to actually close the program. DoctorZ was originally designed to sit in the background, like in your system tray, and since some of that code changed in WinXP and Vista, that might be causing the problem.

Apprentice Joined: 03 Feb 2007 Posts: 170

When I open the program I also get this message:

File->Exit does actually close it though and not just minimize it.

Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 11:42 pm

Yep, that's the change in ICMP that I was talking about. The code that tries to detect the old Win95 libraries don't know how to handle the XP and Vista ICMP library version.

This thread has gotten pretty far off topic though. DoctorZ was last compiled in Delphi 5. So it won't even compile in Delphi 2007, which means it's probably never going to get updated (since only a small handful of people bought it). That's why it still isn't sold on this site. It's nice to hear that it still kind of works, but it's not worth the time and effort to take away from CMUD right now to work on it.