Hi,

For many months we suffered through periods of intense lag on our server, full or not the server at times would just perform poorly. We'd spectate and locate players that appeared to be causing the lag, their lagmeters would have sharp and regular patterned "spikes"! When we'd locate and kick these players the performance of the server would then return to normal.

I started to notice that the most intense "laggers" would have a "RATE" setting of 2500 (the DEFAULT rate setting). An "rcon status" shows a players current rate setting, located at the end of their name. I also noticed these "laggers" almost entirely had pings well BELOW 150. Since a rate of 2500 is for 56k modem users I thought something stunk! It would seem many players install the game and don't really bother going into depth with the config menu, resulting in a lot of players with BROADBAND connections and DEFAULT rate settings of 2500 (56k modem)!!

Having one, maybe two of these improperly configured players on your server isn't noticeable, however having 4 or 5 and our server would start to LAG!

So we decided to experiment!

(Our notice)
http://www.headsgonnaroll.com/gog/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=726

Our admins then began enforcing a MINIMUM rate setting of 6000! All our players are on broadband (haven't met any this year who aren't). In any event our "maximum ping" setting on our server is 175 which pretty much ensures you're on broadband to begin with. 99% of our players have rates set at 9000 or higher (9000 being the max we offer) we enforce the minimum at 6000 to allow a little room for adjustment.

The results:
When ALL players rates MATCH their CONNECTION lag is virtually HISTORY! We haven't had ANY complaints of lag since we started (a full MONTH)! I cannot stress this strongly enough! When you go from 1-2 lag complaints (simultaneously from multiple players) an hour to NONE you can't help but wonder. Naturally we get a single player every few days that complains of lag, upon inspection it turns out to be someone downloading on their LAN or some other condition pertaining only to THAT player.

Since admins are able to set the "maximum ping" of players allowed on their server we'd now like to be able to set the "minimum RATE" of players we want on our server.

The two go hand-in-hand (rate and ping) and anyone disbelieving the outcome is invited to perform the same experiment on their server. Guess what you have to lose? THE LAG!

So how bout it Raven? Our server wants to have a minimum rate of 6000, we'd much rather have our admins playing and enjoying the game and not tied up with checking, instructing and kicking players with INCORRECT rate settings. We've conducted and collected the results of our experiment and we're certainly NOT shooting from the hip.

BTW we do run server messenger telling players what the min. rate is and how to set it BEFORE they get kicked (and get kicked they do), but we'd like an automated solution here. Please give EvenBalance the green light to do this.

Let's open up the discussion!


Thanks for your attention on this matter, Gibbed


P.S. About one third (33.33%) of the players we had set their rates correctly...To match their connections...Now enjoy and 40% REDUCTION in their PINGS!! Watch players as they set their rates correctly and you'll instantly see some of their pings drop from 150 to about 90!

their rate does NOT affect the server. it just affects thier lag and thier ping, ok it may make them harder to hit but its not lagging the server

Trust me, MULTIPLE players with incorrect rate settings causes lag for everyone, we did this for a month. We're also aware some were doing this to avoid being hit.  

Make sure the server has the following settings, and you can have the 56kers in there without any effect on your playing, what you did was basically find a work around for your real problem:

seta g_synchronousclients "0"
seta g_smoothClients "1"

Interesting... I don't see why that would happen, as we haven't had any problems with these low connection players, and they haven't affected anyone but themselves.

Here is a typical morning...

(Admin connects to server)
Hears players complain of lag every 10 mins. or so.

Admin does an 'rcon status' and finds 5 or so players with incorrect rate settings (their rates are set at 2500 but their pings indicate their using broadband connections)

Admin removes ALL players with incorrect rate settings from the server. Players then rejoice and thank the admin for showing up! That’s it, no server settings are changed on the fly, nothing but the removal of the players.

Theres nothing more I can add, it can easily be checked on other servers. Have several players set their rates incorrectly on purpose and check the effect it has on everyone else.

Thanks for trying to troubleshoot it but in all actuality it's really just that simple.  

You sure it wasn't the people you kicked that complained about the lag?

Found this on Quake3 Tweaks

RATE
The rate command specifies how much bandwidth you have available. The following is a quote from John Carmack (Id-Software):

"The most important one is 'rate', which is what the connection speed option in the menu sets.

We are fairly conservative with the values we set for the given modem speeds: 2500 for 28.8, 3000 for 33, and 3500 for 56k. You may actually be connecting faster than that, and modem compression may be buying you something, so you might get a better play experience by increasing the values slightly.

If you connect at 50000 bps, try a rate of 5000, etc., I err on the conservative side, because too low of a rate will only make the movement of other things in the world choppy, while too high of a rate can cause huge amounts of lag.

Note that the optimal rate will be somewhat lower than a rate for QW or Q2, because I now include the UDP packet header length in the bandwidth estimate."


This would seem to be counter intuitive to the statement that low rates cause the server to lag. I can however see that a wide range of rates might cause some delays and lag. It would be interesting to see if you ran the rates down but kept the same range 2500~5000 between all the users if it would fix the lag.
-]-CBK-> Knife