Why the lag in online servers?

[Black_Sage29]

My specs are:

Intel Celeron 900
2 Gigs of Ram
Intel GMA 4500M

It's an old laptop but I can run this game smoothe as butter OFFLINE


When I get online the game lags so much it's pretty much unplayable. Specifically when there's a lot of people in Battlefields 1 server and especially IRSS Dogfight server.

IRSS Dogfight I expect some lag because it's a russian server but Battlefields and Skies of Valor are closer and I ping pretty good there...yet there is still tons of lag especially when getting around other players

When there's not a lot of players in the server the game runs pretty smoothe even on the russian server. But when more players join it gets really choppy


I have fast cable internet so my connection can't be the problem. The lag is so bad it's forcing me to stop playing the game all together

[IceFire]

Hi Black Sage... hard to say exactly without more details.

What kinds of things do you do offline that would put your system in a similar workload position as multiplayer? Play any big campaigns with lots of aircraft flying around?

Battlefields1 (I'm an admin and a map maker so I have a bit of an idea there anyways - can't speak to Skies of Valor quite as much) is a 64 player server and on a weekend we do tend to see at least 30 players if not approaching our max around 55-60 players the odd time. That's a lot of net traffic and keeping track of objects. We do strive for efficiency in the map design but there is only so much we can do without making everything totally static and uninteresting.

Your system is very low spec. The Celeron 900 is a single core with a TDP of 35W which essentially means that it's designed for power efficiency (at least by 2009 standards). The Intel GMA 4500 draws CPU cycles for overhead on the graphics work and it doesn't have its own memory so it draws from your 2GB of ram to do the video work as well. If the network chipset is integrated and it also requires some CPU use to process all of that... then you're really taxing a CPU that doesn't have a lot of overhead to work with.

So to summarize... my guess is that a couple of things are happening:

1) Offline you aren't stressing the system to the same level.
2) Online you're stressing the system more and with more players comes more net traffic that puts quite a bit of overhead on a bottlenecked system.

Has it gotten worse recently? Do you notice a pattern of when there is a performance loss? Is it actually lag (i.e. does your ping time increase when this happening) or is it other performance related issues.

I can suggest some things:

1) Make sure that when you're playing IL-2 that whatever performance features are available on your system are enabled. So rather than power saving you want to go for maximum performance. Check the windows power settings for details.

2) Make sure that there is nothing unnecessarily running in the background. Some anti-virus software suck down CPU and RAM just sitting there doing nothing particularly useful. Do you have a lot of helper applications running for things like Skype, SkyDrive, DropBox, etc.? Try temporarily disabling some of those.

3) Make sure all of your devices have updated drivers. Windows Update can help with that fairly automatically these days. Less hunting around than required before.

Not sure what else to suggest... what OS is the system running? Back in the Windows XP days I always suggested Googling how to setup a static memory page file as IL-2 hated XP's memory management and whenever it resized the memory it would cause terrible pausing and stutters online. Windows Vista and on fixed that particular problem.

[Black_Sage29]

Thanks for responding.

I think my specs are the problem then. My ping is always good online, but since everything is being drawn from the 2 gigs of RAM that's probably causing a performance issue.

[IceFire]

If you have the budget... a low-medium spec barebones PC (I'm assuming this is a tower?) with a Core i5 and 4GB of RAM with a dedicated (but nothing top end) video card would be the way to go if IL-2 1946 is your only gaming need. You can sometimes find these for $350-$450ish. Barebones... so assuming you already have keyboard/mouse/monitor/etc. and just need a tower to plug it all in to. Save some money that way

[RPS69]

More players at the same time, means more traffic.
So... are you connected by Wi-Fi, or by wire?
If you are using Wi-Fi, try conecting the wire and test it again. Wi-Fi is processor dependant, and if your processor gots too heavy loaded, you may get a slower connection.

just a guess... but it was very common on older NB with slow processors.

[EJGr.Ost_Caspar]

Just a an idea (and a question)... would it help it a bit, if he sets up 'ISDN' or eben '56kb' in the network setting? Might this cut the traffic down to 'slower but lighter' packages?

[KG26_Alpha]

Setting the network to 56k is always a good idea on DF servers.

But I think its just a simple matter of processing power online.

[Black_Sage29]

I usually play On LAN network settings since that's the fastest speed

I always thought setting it to ISDN would cause things to slow down

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Black_Sage29

I usually play On LAN network settings since that's the fastest speed

I always thought setting it to ISDN would cause things to slow down

Changes how the packets are handled and it might reduce the overhead required to process them. In some cases it could provide a performance increase. You can easily experiment and then if it provides no tangible benefit then you can always switch back.

[MaxGunz]

See how others are experiencing lag when you do. It's possible that the server is trying to host too many players at once.