I posted this on the official Customer Service forum, but I figured I might as well post it here too, in case anyone here might be able to help.
It's important to note that BioWare is having some issues with connection timeouts right now. More than a thousand people have posted on this issue (they had to make a second sticky), so I realize it might not be on my end at all, though something - call it a gut feeling - tells me it is.
Copy-pasta incoming:
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Title: [Latency] Any way to figure out if this is my end BEFORE I call campus IT?
This is mainly aimed at fellow posters as I have no idea how to solve this myself and I don't think a "read the troubleshooting guide" CSR response will solve it.
TL;DR: Having latency issues. Might not be on their end. Need help fixing it.
Warning: i'm total idiot when it comes to technical stuff, so the information that follows may not be useful.
Introduction
I live in a kind of dormitory with about 40 computers hooked up on the network. As such, a lot of variables present themselves when dealing with a subject such as latency. Before I take this to the IT guy, I'd like to find out as much as I can about the issue.
Case
When I log on, my latency will either jump around from ~50ms to ~3000ms or be a steady ~1500ms. Sometimes a lagspike will occur (connection timeout), sending the latency into the five digit area before normalizing again, if not booting me with error 9000 (timeout).
Around night time, when the server (and connection) load diminishes, the instability seems to plateau a bit, usually giving lower latency and less spikes, but not always. Today, for instance, at 4AM, the latency is hovering at around 2000ms with dips into the 1000's and spikes into the 10,000's (plus one error 9000).
Possible causes
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but it can't be the firewall as I'd receive an error upon trying to log in, right? The entire thing smells a lot like connection instability which can be caused by ports not being open, connection overload and the ISP routing the connection through a bad node/hub/thingamajig, right?
It's not a connection overload, I think. I can log on WoW and play with a latency of around 100ms in there. I can download a patch at 1.5MB/s and stream HD video from multiple sites (YouTube, Twitch.tv, etc.).
If this is all due to a bad connection on the ISP side, how do I go about fixing that? Do I just call them up and tell them to reroute my connection? It sounds simple, but I imagine it's not.
And before I call the aforementioned IT guy and ask him to please open the 20,000 ports requested by the troubleshooting guide, does anyone have any ideas as to what might be the culprit here?
I'm at the verge of a total breakdown here. Nothing frustrates me more than a problem I don't know how to solve. So before I turn into Leeloo from The Fifth Element and go all "Pweeeease... haaaalp..." on you, thank you for your time and help.
Addendum
I've run a 30,000 packet ping to this site, Google.com and the IP of my server and received 1 packet loss total. The pings have been running through lagspikes and disconnects.
I cannot do a traceroute as the router (according to IT guy) doesn't allow it. The traceroute merely times out on every hop and successfully completes on the final hop at normal ping latency.
I should probably also mention two more things:
1. I'm running a legal torrent in the background (10Kbit/s download max) to see if it prevents error 9000 (it doesn't on my end) and I've noticed that the torrent's download speed drops when a lagspike occurs. On most lagspikes, the torrent download speed drops to a couple of hundred bit/s or stops completely.
2. Refreshing my browser (F5) sometimes clears lagspikes and returns latency to normal values (50ms). This only works sometimes, however, and the effect only lasts a couple of seconds.
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Let me know if more information is required - and what kind of information. Since I'm not in direct control of the system here, it's limited what I can find without having to drag the IT guy into it.
Thanks
Edited, Jan 7th 2012 5:05am by Mazra