IDNet Post

[browney]

IDNet ping problem

The official:

We've been investigating the ping spikes. It's been a curious one and what hasn't helped is that the issue has lacked consistency in that most customers seem to be unaffected. Mostly gamers (and not all of them for sure) seem to be affected for obvious reasons.

Though not yet confirmed, we suspect the route of the cause could be a faulty interface card. We're just waiting now for more data from some intensive debugging reports we've been running and then we should be in a better position to decide on the best solution. The ping spikes are almost certainly caused by the BGP scanner, though this in itself is not unusual and has proven to be a red herring, only the spikes are higher than would be expected which suggests they're the symptom of another issue. All configuration modifications to date have yielded little improvement which is leading us to the conclusion that we have a faulty interface card which may simply require replacing.

We're almost there but we want to be certain before we take the necessary steps to fix.

Any affected, sit tight for a couple of days.

 

[FarFarAway]

Thanks for that dude. It's great that IDNET are looking into it - awesome customer service

 

[browney]

Mine were a rock solid 27ms last night on a UK bf2 server and i am happy with that any lower and its

 

[browney]

More udates

Quick update for you as promised. Though not yet confirmed, we suspect the route of the cause to be a faulty interface card. We're just waiting now for some more data from some intensive debugging reports we've been running and then we should be in a better position to decide on the best solution. "

This was 5:30pm on Friday night so hopefully their continued testing will have thrown up some useful info and we'll hear more as soon as...

Hi Guys

We are indeed deep into investigations. We have two independant teams of Cisco consultants evaluating the situation with us. Rather troubling is that neither of them agree that there is a problem and both have conflicting views as to the possible cause of the ping spikes.

The reason why they regard the situation as not being a problem is that the router in question is doing the right thing by treating pings as lowest priority. Bear in mind that game play uses UDP pakets; ICMP (ping) packets are not used for anything other than checking if a host (server or router) is live or not. Using ping to measure network performance is self-defeating due to its low priority rating.

I am not trying to say that the 'ping spikes' are unusual and we are trying to get the bottom of it. We are treating this as high priority even though it does not appear to be affecting most game players. Please check the OC3D forums and see here: http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=idnet&Number=2630158

If these guys were affected then there would be a deafening clamour!

Maxping, your symptoms of consistently high pings do not line-up with a regular 5 second ping rise each minute. If you could please call Support then we'll run some line checks for you.

Will keep you updated.

Cheers

Simon

 

[PV5150]

Yep it's nice to see an ISP maintain frequent communications with a customer regarding a service issue, and that they actually work with you. At least you're not just a number mate, compared with other ISP's.

 

[browney]

Yep it's nice to see an ISP maintain frequent communications with a customer regarding a service issue, and that they actually work with you. At least you're not just a number mate, compared with other ISP's.

I am a number i'm customer 240:worship:

 

[PV5150]

I'm sure you're feeling kinda special right about now rofl

 

[JN]

I did some checks the other day and noticed that i too suffer with the 'ping' problem.

However, this in no way affects my ping in CSS which remains at a constant 7-10ms.

Its nice to see that IDNet are taking the problem seriously even tho for most of us it has no side effects.

 

[Ham]

What speed connection you on XMS?

 

[mrapoc]

im on max and i get these ping problems at random occurances - when it happens it happens bad (woosh up to 100+ when my aol friend/fool is getting 30-40) but idnet have yet to let me down

www.idnetters.idnet.co.uk im a gaming mod

 

[Danni]

Another IDNet customer with problems here... though when I last spoke to Simon on the phone (the account is in my partner's name) he did ask "is that Danni?".

Since he's only ever seen me posting on forums (here, ADSLGuide and IDNetters) I know that not only is he reading the posts, but he's taking it in as well Only thing is, my cover is now blown!

 

[JN]

Yeah Simon and the IDNet gang do like to keep an eye on the common talking places for IDNet just to make sure that everybody is happy.

CS @ its best

 

[mrapoc]

btw, people with ping problems:

Please can I ask anyone who is experiencing "ping problems" to email support-at-idnet-dot-net so that we can investigate each in detail? Please can you put "ping problem" in the subject line?

We have been performing engineering works on the network during the past week. Apologies if these activities inconvenienced anyone. We have been upgrading interfaces and changing the pathways through which traffic is routed through our network.

With regards the periodical "ping spike" that people have reported seeing on telehouse-gw.idnet.net - this is due to the different methods used by different 'reporting tools'. If you ping the router directly, the interface that the ping arrives on raises a receive interrupt to the CPU which then allocates resources to generate a response. However, pings sent through a router are switched in RAM without generating a CPU interrupt.

Pings destined to the router are allocated a low priority. Every 60 seconds this router checks its BGP routing table and this task takes around 5 seconds. During that time low priority tasks will take longer to complete. Conversely pings sent through a router are treated as normal traffic and thus take precedence over the BGP Scanner.

You can see this for yourself by opening two command line windows and running concurrent ping traces; one to the router directly and one through the router. e.g. if you type "ping -t 212.69.63.40" in one window and "ping -t 212.69.40.254" (this is one of our servers in Telehouse, reached via telehouse-gw.idnet.net) and watch the output for several minutes. The first window will trace responses to pings that are destined directly to the router while the second window will trace responses that are travelling through that router to the server on the other side. The router ping trace shows the "ping spikes" (the BGP Scanner in operation) while the other does not.

Given that the server ping trace is going through the router at the very same time shows that traffic through the router is not affected - only the pings aimed directly at the router are given a lower priority whilst it takes care of its BGP housekeeping stuff.

Graphical ping tools operate by pinging every host in the path concurrently. Pinging our BGP routers is not a valid test of network performance.

The suggestion to try alternative hardware and/or to check that your firmware is up to date stems from several customers having seen improvements with swapping out their router.

We are now confident that our traffic flows within the IDNet network are optimal. I know that there are a few customers whose connection is not performing well. Especially those whose first hop shows a very high ping time. There is clearly something wrong with those connections and so if you could please contact us we will investigate your setup and line characteristics on a case-by-case basis to try to get to the bottom of it for you.

Thanks

Simon

from idnetters

 

[Dav0s]

so if that was the problem, how will it be solved? it seems that they have only identified it? or have they know stopped traffic heading directly via the router?

 

[mrapoc]

no idea but ive emailed simon as requested

 

[Phnom_Penh]

so if that was the problem, how will it be solved? it seems that they have only identified it? or have they know stopped traffic heading directly via the router?

I dunno quite how they'd do it, but redirecting priority traffic through different routers would do the job as a temporary fix. They'd then replace the nic I guess, after redirecting all the traffic.