rec.autos.simulators

--

"Sideways, Slideways, and Every Other Ways"  DW on Fox, 2001

Sounds like you have a "bad router" in your "hops" route to your favorite
"racing" server.  That's not necessarily your cable company's
problem....unless its one of their internal routers.  If this turns out to
be the case, perhaps that router can be replaced (by the vendor)....or maybe
its even possible for you to be assigned to a different cable node....that
won't go that route to your league racing server (that's a remote chance).

But, you should check out your own system first....just to make sure.  The
best way to do that is to go to DSL Reports (or some of the other similar
"quality" Internet check sites.....and run both the download/upload line
test and the system configuration test/check.  DSL Reports link is:
http://www.racesimcentral.net/

You are also going to want to check your "MTU" and your "RWIN" settings on
your computer.  There's a program at DSL Reports to help you do that (if you
don't know how).  I had something of a similar problem back two years
ago....and it virtually disappeared when I reset my MTU to 1500 and the RWIN
to 65535.....but this may not be your problem and/or this may not fix the
problem you do have.

Regarding "line monitoring" you have a couple choices that I know about -
perhaps others will makes some posts with some alternatives?  DSL Reports
has a 24x7 Line Monitoring service listed on the same web page the "tools"
are on (above).  I have not used it....so you will need to check it out
(there may be a charge for this, I'm not sure).  The other alternative is to
use a ping utility something like Ping Plotter.  I have used Ping Plotter
for over five years (and have grown up through all the versions.....starting
way back when I had a 28.8k dialup modem to race with on TEN).  The URL for
Ping Plotter is:  http://www.racesimcentral.net/

There's shareware and freeware versions of Ping Plotter.....its not a lot of
money so I would buy the full version if I was concerned about online
***....which all of us are (besides, Pete Ness is a good guy and could
use the money....lol...).  I think you'll find that a lot of sim racers use
Ping Plotter......but, there's other software around that probably can do
the trick too.  Hopefully a few answers to your post will give you some
alternatives too.

There's a very good article (basic laymen terms) about using Ping Plotter
type software (or MS "trace route") to troubleshoot your ISP connections and
service at:  http://www.racesimcentral.net/
If nothing else, this will bone you up on the "lingo" and operations of the
Internet connections, the software and "how it works" stuff.....always good
to know if you get into a battle with your ISP (who usually tries to feed
you BS...until you demonstrate more knowledge than they have on the
topic....lol...).

You probably "hit the nail on the head" right off....its a bad router
somewhere in the path you normally take to your favorite race server(s).
Sometimes, these can go un-noticed for months and months....until someone
proves the router is dysfunctioning.  Often, they become dysfunctional only
under load....and that can vary during the day with I-traffic capacity on
the route.....as I'm sure you know.

Good luck...it sounds like this is becoming enough of  a problem for your
online racing that all this work to "trace the problem" is going to be worth
it.

Don't hesitate to send me an email if you have any other questions.  But to
tell you the truth, I'm not all that knowledgeable on the subject.......and
what I've told you here is pretty much 100% of my knowledge base on the
topic.....pretty much surface stuff as it is.  Perhaps some of the
"wiz-kids" on Internet connections that read r.a.s. can fill in some of the
missing pieces for you?

Regards,

Tom Pabst

I had exactly the same problem, only it was from the first day. What I did
to diagnose was first see what was the first ip address in routes to the
internet using tracert in dos, then run pingplotter to plot the times to
that node. This will measure the pings across the cable and nothing else. In
my case it showed execellent pings overall, in the order of 4ms, but at
times excesses of 1-3 seconds. Those are enough to disco from a race server,
but normal internet use would only experience a small pause. A bit later I
found out that at the time of the high pings, my modem's sync led went off;
and it came back on by itself. The cable co sent out a technician to try and
repair it, but that did not help. So I used cable for normal internet and
used to dialin for online races. I have adsl now for 6 months and that works
great.

The cause for the loss of sync was either in cable quality (outside my
house) or in signals from other devices on the same cable segment, like old
tv's, in combination with the particular modulation technique. At the time I
discovered that many other Lancity cable modem users had similar problems.
But changing to a different modem brand was not an option for the cable co.

You use tracert in a dos box like this:

C:\WINDOWS>tracert www.xs4all.nl

Tracing route to www.xs4all.nl [194.109.6.92]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms   <10 ms   <10 ms  192.168.1.1
  2    12 ms    12 ms    16 ms  195.190.241.23
  3    18 ms    18 ms    18 ms  32.ge-1-1-0.xr1.pbw.xs4all.net
[194.109.5.65]
  4    19 ms    19 ms    20 ms  www.xs4all.nl [194.109.6.92]

Trace complete.

In this example the first hop is my router (192.168.1.1), so you would want
to run pingplotter on the 2nd hop.

You find pingplotter at www.pingplotter.com. You can also use a dos command,
but the output won't be as nice:

C:\WINDOWS>ping -t www.xs4all.nl

Pinging www.xs4all.nl [194.109.6.92] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 194.109.6.92: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=252
Reply from 194.109.6.92: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=252
Reply from 194.109.6.92: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=252
Reply from 194.109.6.92: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=252
Reply from 194.109.6.92: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=252
Reply from 194.109.6.92: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=252
Reply from 194.109.6.92: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=252
Reply from 194.109.6.92: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=252

Ping statistics for 194.109.6.92:
    Packets: Sent = 8, Received = 8, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 16ms, Maximum =  17ms, Average =  16ms
Control-C

I had to ping the 4th hop here as they seem to have disabled ping on the 2nd
hop. If you can watch your modem lights at the same time, it will be easy to
spot if you also have the sync problem. There is no need to do this while
running N4 or such, just let the ping run for an hour or so and check the
output for excssive ping times. By using a hop as nearby as possible you
rule out irregularities outside the cable network.

Bart Westra

  Good Luck!
Charlie

Tom