Rockets are skipping!! This server is lagging and sucks!! FIX IT!!

[VoiDeD]

This is a pretty common complaint I hear on the DB server all the time.

The response is simply this: Actually, your client sucks. You fix it.

Enable your net_graph (or perhaps you already play with it enabled).


See that lerp value? If that value is anywhere below 30ms you are going to experience "rocket skipping" and other kinds of jittery lag.

Here's the problem: lots of dodgeball players like to believe they're experts in all things Source Engine Configuration, and share configs that set the cl_interp and cl_interp_ratio convars to absurd values that reduce or effectively disable interpolation.

Clientside interpolation exists for the purpose of smoothing out gameplay by maintaining an interpolation buffer of entity positions. Instead of displaying entities at the position they were when the server sent a packet to the client, the client will instead display entities X milliseconds (where X is your lerp value) in the past, so that if the server isn't able to send timely packets (or perhaps there's a period of increased loss or latency jitter) the client will smoothly interpolate entity positions to where they should have been (if that packet had arrived, etc).

By setting your cl_interp convars to low values, you are decreasing how much of a buffer the client gets to smooth out gameplay, and you will experience "rocket skipping".

So do me a favor: before you complain that the server sucks, check that your client settings don't suck.

[VoiDeD]

I'm turning this thread into more of a series of posts about potential things that can cause lag.

Another look at the net_graph:


Is your choke value consistently higher than 0? Then you are most definitely experiencing some lag.

There's two possibilities here: your rates are misconfigured or the server's rates are misconfigured. In our server's case, though, we have our rates configured for maximum throughput so the issue would likely reside on your side.

Double check that your cl_updaterate and rate convars aren't set to low values. Ideally you'd want to completely max out these convars, so generally the following is a good config:

cl_updaterate 999
rate 99999999

If you have these values maxed out and you're still experiencing lag, then you have my permission to blame the server. (And you should also message me and tell me what map you've experienced this on)

[VoiDeD]

One more look:


Is your loss value consistently higher than 0?

Well, this is the one case where neither we nor yourself can do anything.

Packet loss is just a fundamental property of networking. Sometimes packets just get dropped due to network conditions (either with our host, your ISP, or the countless networks and routers that connect everything together).

If you're experiencing loss on our servers and servers run by other communities, chances are it's related to your ISP. You could try contacting them about it or just wait it out. If you're only experiencing high loss on our servers, then it's either a networking issue with our host or our host's network peers.

[VoiDeD]

Lastly, another situation might happen where you're seeing high latency (normally around 100ms above average) to perhaps only some of our servers, or perhaps all of them.

In this case, the issue can again lie at any location between our server and your computer. It's easy to quickly blame us, but first do some digging: open up a command prompt and run the following command:

tracert tf.saxtonhell.com

Observe the output. On the left side you'll see your latency to various routers that your packets travel through in order to reach our server. If the latency suddenly spikes somewhere in between your home network and our server; the blame can be placed there.



However, if you see that latencies have increased at the dallas-idc.com or lstn.net hops, then there are likely some network issues going on with our host and they'll likely be resolved soon.

What can be done about any of this? Not much, but it's important to understand where the issue exists before playing the blame game.

[Electromaster]

Voidy is so smart and that's hot