Lowering Your Ping for Non-Internode peps

Bootlegger · Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 46

Well...with all the b.s thatseems to have spawned in the forum I thought I'd post something thats actually useful.. Smile

I wuold suggest you do this 'manualy' and not use the.vbs file - that wya you will at least see where it goes and be able to remove it if you find it doesn't work for you (it certainly works for me btw)

Courtesy of Katryna on Aman'Thul (via WoW forums)

Disclaimer: This is something I've posted on my guild forums and we've had some success using the techinique posted below. The script isn't my work although it replicates a registry key I figured out myself.
I'm sure a bunch of people will comment on how it's extremely unsafe to run .vbs files you've downloaded from the internet. I agree totally. The script is provided for those people who don't feel comfortable editing the registry themselves.

To give an example of the kind of improvement I've seen. When playing around last night during peak time I was getting a ping of 250 when normally it would be around 400-500.

----
Okay thanks to the internode and lowerping stuff and random people around in the warcraft community. We now know that blizz has screwed up their netcode and this means people with high latency suffer more than they should.

For those who know their networking basically blizz follows nagle's algorithm(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm) but don't understand the consequences for players with higher latencies. They could easily allieviate some of our latency issues by opening our connection with tcp_nodelay enabled.

Luckily for us we can disable "Nagle's algorithm" on our computers in windows by setting a simple registry key.

1. Open the registry editor by going start->run and typing "regedit" then pressing enter
2. Nagivate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\"
3. Look in each of the keys inside that one (they look like: {random numbers and letters]) and determine which one is your network connection. You can tell this since it will have your computers local ip address stored in it.
4. Add a new key called "TcpAckFrequency" of type REG_DWORD and set the value to 1.
4b. If you are using windows 2000 call this new key "TcpDelAckTicks" and set it to 0 instead.
5. Restart your computer.

You should now see an improvement of perhaps 100-200ms.

If at some stage you wish to remove the key just go in there and delete it.

To make it even more braindead some smart people out there came up with this script: http://files.racs.com.au/_WOW/SetAckTick.vbs

I've looked at it and all it does it set some keys in your registry. No harm will come from running it. If you happen to use applications that send out alot of small packets of data though this will negatively impact performance. But since most of you probably play wow, download "movies", and music you'll be fine.. If you do alot of telnetting then you might need to disable the registry "fixes" if you're concerned about performance.

-------- TLDR VERSION -----------
Run this: http://files.racs.com.au/_WOW/SetAckTick.vbs
Restart computer
Load wow
Enjoy lower pings

For vista you'll need to download this patch http://thehotfixshare.net/board/index.php?showtopic=3265
It is a microsoft patch but its a beta release for the upcoming sp1.

For XP you shouldn't need to download anything provided you've kept your system up to date.

.

So there it is - a ping 'fix' for those who don't use Internode as their ISP ...

Ccpl · Joined: 20 Mar 2006 Posts: 370

Be cautious of these solutions for the following reasons:

The "lowerping" and internode solutions of using SSH tunneling to bypass QoS rules for outside traffic works great - the traffic appears to come from the US and isnt throttled by QoS, therefore resulting in less latency.

The problem with this is that Blizzards own powerleveing busting software detects that your account is being used in a different country then where it originated from, therefore banning you in the process as it looks like you are using a powerleveling service/goldmaking service etc. (few posts on the WoW/Internode forums already about this)

This really is a Blizzard problem, and hopefully will be fixed up (though probably not soon)

The registry hack trick really isnt something I would recommend playing around with.

It basically modifies the TCP ACK transmission so that TCP doesnt wait for a response before sending the next packets. This is good for lowering your ping, but sending data through is another story.

So your in game ping may look alot lower and stay in the green, but your actual latency will most likely get much worse as packets arent received and have to be resent (as the receiving server will send a retry request).
_________________
Cecepel - 70 Mage
Bubbleocece - 70 Pally
Cacapal - 70 rogue

All better geared than your mum

Bootlegger · Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 46

"Reduced network latency by disabling the Nagle algorithm"

this is from the latest Patch Notes 2.3.2 (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html)

Not too sure whether this means they'll auto update our registry or make it so we don't have to - either way is good to see them addressing the issue at their end.

edit: typo

Ccpl · Joined: 20 Mar 2006 Posts: 370

Means that they will disable the use of the Nagle algy for the WoW based TCP connections.

I would very much doubt that they will change anything to do with your registry.
_________________
Cecepel - 70 Mage
Bubbleocece - 70 Pally
Cacapal - 70 rogue

All better geared than your mum