Crazy pings

smainville

Ok, I've been looking for an explanation for a while on this. In practice with about 12-15cars on the track my ping varies from 65 to 200ms and that is playable. On the other hand at the start of the race as we are coming to the green(ie. stockars)the ping will go through the roof like 700-800-1500ms and then slowly come down, by that time I've position myself to the back as to not become a problem to others. Once in a while when I'm either passed or I come close to someone the ping goes back up again. It is so weird. Any idea?
 
Definatelly check you internet connection as it looks, it might be related to it.
Pick some popular mods and tracks and go on the lobby to see if the same issue happen on different servers (to be sure whether or not it might be also related to dedic settings).
 
If you are a long way from the telephone exchange or the wires between you and the exchange are bad/old, you will get packet loss and then error correction will kick in, which basically re-downloads the data from the lost packet. It happens within milliseconds but it can also build up and start to choke your net.
It could also have nothing to do with you and be at the server's end. If it is a server someone has set up at home, it will be reliant on their network quality and their upload bandwidth (usually download bandwidth is plenty but upload is limited).

You can run this test http://www.pingtest.net/ it will give you an idea of your connection. Preferably pick a test server near the location of the rFactor server you use.

Here is some good tips on network tweaking and testing http://www.speedguide.net A lot of it is pretty advanced and registry edits are part of it, so be careful if you aren't familiar with editing the registry.
 
rFactor (as probably all games) use UDP protocol so there is no error correction and reconnection, like for TCP.
For UDP, it's just "I'm sending it and hopefully, you will get it" (sort of unregistered mail ;-) ).
Not only that, there are situations where your TCP ping might be perfect, but in online gaming you will get sky-high pings... I had that when I overclocked my CPU. I set FSB to 500MHz (which was perfectly fine in Prime95, Orthos etc.) and probably the South Bridge was loosing it's stability, so my integrated network NIC suffered from that and I had pings like 400-500ms, even though my TCP pings were as usual (about 30-40ms) :)

So if that things happen and you have overclocked PC, it's good to also check if the issue still there when you bring down your clocks to stock, just to be sure.
 
Unfortunately, that is not 100% accurate. rFactor use quite a bit of TCP. We tend to use it for some what we call guaranteed messages and for congestion control and dropped connections issues.

A POTENTIAL (that means maybe, possibly, not for sure, possibility it wont happen for years if ever) new network design would limit the use of TCP. Somewhat, similar to what have described.
 
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