Lots of lag

[Obi]

So, I'm sitting there playing quite happily and then an enemy comes along. As soon as I see an enemy my ping shoots up to about 700 and I get "There is a problem with your connection". Whenever there is any action or anything interesting that requires my relfexes I lag out. (It seems like that anyway).

This happens in POE2 and regular BF2. All my settings are on low low low. I'm not downloading anything while I am playing. My ping is usually a steady 150 on other TacticalGamer servers and I don't lag too much. It's only when I play BF2.

If the problem was graphical would I still get the "there is a problem with your connection" message appearing? Does anyone have any advice on what I should do?

AOL DSL 1Mb Broadband

Amd Athlon 2500+
Radeon 9800Pro
512Mb Ram

[BigGaayAl]

Originally Posted by 0b1one

So, I'm sitting there playing quite happily and then an enemy comes along. As soon as I see an enemy my ping shoots up to about 700 and I get "There is a problem with your connection". Whenever there is any action or anything interesting that requires my relfexes I lag out. (It seems like that anyway).

This happens in POE2 and regular BF2. All my settings are on low low low. I'm not downloading anything while I am playing. My ping is usually a steady 150 on other TacticalGamer servers and I don't lag too much. It's only when I play BF2.

If the problem was graphical would I still get the "there is a problem with your connection" message appearing? Does anyone have any advice on what I should do?

AOL DSL 1Mb Broadband

Amd Athlon 2500+
Radeon 9800Pro
512Mb Ram

Hmm must indeed be connection problems because of the message. I have everything on lowexcept terrain. I do not get what you describe, from (!) Europe. It is possible that it has to do with the way your internet is configured. I don't know alot about that sorta thing, but you can set things like packet size etc...Although that should make it so you have lag in all games. BF is pretty intensive compared to most shooters though.

-Does the problem manifest itself at beginnings of rounds or the whole round?

[Obi]

Originally Posted by BigGaayAl

-Does the problem manifest itself at beginnings of rounds or the whole round?

The whole round.

[Tempus]

For how long has this been happening?

[Drizzid]

This was posted by Santa in another thread and it might not be related to your problem but it is worth a try:

Theres a now known bug that whenever you load the map "Gaurdian" on low Terrain settings, you CTD. Just bump terrain up to medium and youll be good to go.
__________________

You might want to give this a try. Maybe you were in the map Guardian?

[Santa]

Ya wouldnt have been even able to join the gaurdian map if that were the case. I think apophis's job has something to do with connections and what not, so maybe he'll see this thread.

[Obi]

Originally Posted by Tempus

For how long has this been happening?

This has been happening for months. Litterally months. I stopped playing BF2 for a while but I have started again and I still get lots of lag. Vanilla BF2 and POE2 both suffer from lots of lag.

[perry]

Just on TG's servers? Can you take one for the team and try it on a UK server?

I'm almost tempted to say to get more RAM...

[thebleakaffinity]

Just a guess, but maybe a router/ports issue?

[Obi]

So I joined up a UK server and I stuttered all over the place. This time however it was a constant stutter throughout the round with no "Connection Problems" messages. That makes me think it is RAM.

I joined the TG server. I was the only person on it. My ping was aroun 160. Now the interesting thing is, when i jumped in a tank, set off smoke and fired the main gun close to me, my ping jumped up to 300. I would not have thought my ping would be affected by graphical stress.

It's about time I got more RAM anyway.

[Lorian]

Originally Posted by 0b1one

My ping was aroun 160.

That's interesting, I'm in the south of England, near the coast. A while ago I did a traceroute and my packets went up to Scotland, back to near where I am before going off to America, yet I average around 100-120, often going sub 100. I wonder where that 60ms is going...

[BigGaayAl]

I totally can't figure out how it says connection problems, while were talking about a lack of ram.

Still I see you have nearly the same rig as I. I have the same graphics card, but i recently got 756mb ram. Then I have a 2ghz pentium4.

It is actually quite a stretch to play with this hardware, especially on a full server, especially on the mods which are usually more straining because they have too much smoke and models and other things that eat framerates.

Getting some ram will certainly help out, but more expertise is needed in this thread!! Help him out guys!


Ps Yesterday on poe I shot + 30 bullets into a sniper from 1meter range, the blood flying all around, he was screaming....then he knifed me. Later I ran up to the extremely defended farm flag and I could just run around for like over a minute right in the middle of a whole enemy squad as they were shooting at me. I could not hit them and they could not hit me. Funny as hell that second one. Someone remember that? I think I was the only guy that even got to farm Now that is lag!

[Bodofooko]

I would definately say its in a connection issue. This happened to me all the time a while back. I always had a good ping but every once in a while I would get huge lag spikes/disconnects. I ran some online diagnostic stuff online and fond a high rate of packet loss. It turned out to be a line quality issue. I'd call your provider and have them check out your connection quality.

[Boot]

I think I found your problem Ob1one.

Originally Posted by 0b1one

512Mb Ram

Next time you're playing watch your disk light when you start to lag. My guess is your machine is swapping page file memory like a champ.

[Lekdevil.NL]

Originally Posted by BigGaayAl

Getting some ram will certainly help out, but more expertise is needed in this thread!! Help him out guys!

Lekdevil.NL, CCNP, CISSP, reporting for duty!

As others have said, 512 MB of RAM is quite a pinch for BF2, especially when playing PoE. Excessive paging to disk may cause the client's network connection to suffer, simply because it's not keeping up with the messages received from the server. Try to borrow, steal or buy an extra 512 MB in any case.

Other things to try:

The obvious thing: make sure all background programs, anti-virus scanners and downloaders are closed, that you've got a minimal number of Windows services running, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Make sure that your Connection Settings in the Game Options are set to "Cable 256kbps or better" and not to "T1 (LAN)". The former will make the server cap the amount of traffic sent to your client, whilst the latter could (possibly) overload your downstream capacity (not likely, though, if you've really got a 1 Mbps connection).

Download and run PingPlotter, and have it ping the game server with an interval of 1 second. Then connect to the server with BF2 (keeping PP running in the background). If you get any connection problems, check the plot for latency spikes and packet loss (post the graph here if you don't know how to interpret it).