Poor Ping

[Mr_Burns]

Is there any advice on how to improve ping?

 

I have a pretty fast internet connection here is Australia but every time I play multiplayer I get kicked for >300 ping.

 

Can get it to low 20's on Battlefield when selecting Australian servers.

 

I think I have just answered my question - I need to find DCS World Australia Servers?

[Rainbowed]

yep, geographic loaction of the sever matters for ping value, A LOT.

 

but i wont be too worried. since DCSW is till kinda new and in BETA, im sure the number of DCSW severs will be increasing as time goes on.

Edited June 7, 2012 by Rainbowed

[nemises]

yes...ping (latency) is a function of the "distance" your packets have to travel and return.

 

As an excersize, try this...get the ip address of your favourite servers

Open up a command prompt , and type in "tracert 111.222.333.444" (where 111.222 etc is the IP adress of the server" and press enter.

 

This will trace out the path, and the "length" in milliseconds of the various points that your packets have to transit to hit that particular server..

 

The fewer points, and lower the latency between them, the lower the overall latency should be..

 

anyways..

 

I think that the Stallturn server that Moa runs is in New Zealand, so, if you should get +/- 150ms pings to that?

[EtherealN]

Also matters what kind of setup the server uses; something that's sitting at a commercial hosting center with multiple redundant backbone connections is going to have much less "hops" on the route than something that's sitting in someone's apartment. For example, it's not unheard of to have better connection to a "properly" hosted server in another country than a server in the same country that is on someone's private, home, connection. (Though in this case, for Australia, this is probably not true since you're pretty much a continent of your own and would be hitting underwater cables for anything that's not domestic, but this would be relevant in, for example, Europe.)

 

Think of it like this:

A "properly" hosted server might see you go (simplified):

Home>ISP>BackBone>Server>Backbone>ISP>Home.

Someone's home server:

Home>ISP>BackBone>TheirISP>Server>TheirISP>BackBone>ISP>Home.

(Obviously it's way more complicated when taking the "proper" deatils into account, but it gets the point across. :) )

 

But as Nemises said and you yourself suspected: most of the time you can simply say "the closer to you geographically, the better the ping". And going intercontinental is, generally speaking, a bad idea if your application is latency-sensitive (like most computer games).

 

One further thing to add though: traffic congestion can be a factor as well. A couple months back I had a problem where pretty much everything in Europe lagged out to heck for me when trying to play DCS, but a Russian server located in Moscow worked just fine. When german servers (very close to me) don't work, but Moscow works... I dug a bit and found out that some very important backbone connections were being overloaded, including the ones that handle most of europe, but the one going east was fine. So in this case, going "far" worked better since there was less congestion - this situation you can visualize pretty much the same as you would car traffic in a major city during rush hour. Sometimes you can travel 100km of countryside faster than 5km into city centre, but if the roads are such that you must go via city centre... you cry. (Sort of like almost everyone traveling the east coast of sweden does when they reach Stockholm... :D )

Edited June 7, 2012 by EtherealN

[Mr_Burns]

Thanks guys, im just joining Virtual Australian Air Force - hopefull they will have some servers!