Psn

amolbhatia50k

Sneaky bum time - Vaccination status: dozed off
Joined
Nov 8, 2002
Messages
98,674
Location
india
I've had a rubbish 512 K connection for quite awhile now and with the notion that connections in India generally suck I was resigned to it. Needless to say that every time I went online I faced a huge lag which made online gaming impossible.

Well, I've upgraded now to a 4 MB/S connection which is unreal here. (and normal and just about average for you guys abroad). I'm downloading movies in half and hour which is all frickin' great. But my PS3 just won't budge. I still get the same lag when I go online with it. How a 512 K connection and a 4MBPS connection can have the same lag is beyond me. My impression of the console has gone down severely.

Disappointed.
 
Maybe you need to open some ports in your router?
 
It all depends against who you are playing online. If the other people are in India you should be ok but out of India you will get a laggy connection. Also it isn't just how good/bad your connection it is, it also depends on other peoples as well

Go into command prompt and type in

ping http://www.google.in

It should give you an indication of your ping (assuming Google's server is in India though!). Or instead of google try some other big sites based in India to give you a rough idea.
 
Yep, more likely latency not lag. If you have any games which have localised servers give them a try and see if you still have the same problems.
 
Gaming in general actually needs very little bandwidth, as not a huge amount of data is sent or received. Gaming does need a fast response however, or rather a low latency connection to keep all of the machines in as close a sync as possible.
 
JazzG said:
It all depends against who you are playing online. If the other people are in India you should be ok but out of India you will get a laggy connection. Also it isn't just how good/bad your connection it is, it also depends on other peoples as well

Go into command prompt and type in

ping Google

It should give you an indication of your ping (assuming Google's server is in India though!). Or instead of google try some other big sites based in India to give you a rough idea.
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I always do a quick ranked game, which means they find someone of my level to play against.

I've done this speedtest - Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test.
I get the following results:

Download - 4.47 Mb/s
Upload - 0.85 Mb/s
Ping - 38 ms

Can someone explain this latency to me and whether the above figures indicate something with reference to that? And whether I can improve this.
 
The first two figures are your bandwidth, the third is your latency. Latency is the amount of time it takes a packet to travel from source to destination, and back. It's measured in milliseconds (ms), and generally speaking the farther away the destination is from you, the higher the latency.
 
Something interesting I've just noticed is that the official Playstation website for India is run by SCEE, yep, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, and they've hardly updated the PS3 section in 2 years. It wouldn't therefore surprise me that the network infrastructure for PSN for India is located in Düsseldorf or wherever.
 
Mad said:
The first two figures are your bandwidth, the third is your latency. Latency is the amount of time it takes a packet to travel from source to destination, and back. It's measured in milliseconds (ms), and generally speaking the farther away the destination is from you, the higher the latency.
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So because I'm further away there's no way for me to game without lag? Surely a fast connection takes care of that, doesn't it?
 
amolbhatia100 said:
So because I'm further away there's no way for me to game without lag? Surely a fast connection takes care of that, doesn't it?
Click to expand...

I don't really know how to describe it to you simply. Throughput/bandwidth is the theoretical amount of data you can shove in or out of your connection. Latency is then how long it takes to get to where it is supposed to be going and then come back again, and that can be affected by a lot of different things, the distance it has to travel only being one of them, the destination also needs time to process the data before it sends it back, even the routers along the way have to decide which way it's going to go, and all of this adds to the time or the latency.

If I have a Ferrari and I'm on the motorway from Manchester to London, and there are no other cars, I can go at 200mph. If I'm on the same motorway with 20m other cars, then I obviously can't. I do do the same in a Fiat Panda, the results will be very different in the first case than they will in the second. It's also going to take me less time to go to the shop around the corner than it is to go to the same shop 200 miles away.

As for your question about distance, then in general, the less distance the data has to travel the less time it will take to come back. Games can work on two levels here, they can provide dedicated servers (hopefully located quite close to you), or they can palm you off into a P2P type system where one of the consoles acts as a server and the rest as clients to the game. If they are all in the same room, then you'll get nice speeds, if one is in Tokyo, one in London, one in New York, and the other in Delhi, something has to give.

Just because your theoretical maximum inbound throughput is 4mb/s, does not always mean you'll get that in any case. The PS3 if wired and your router is decent communicate at 1gb/s, the PS3 could in theory throw data at it at that speed. The trouble is, the router can ounly output that data to the Internet at 4mb/s, the the PS3 will have to be told to wait. Then what happens when the data hits another router that only has 2mb/s? Your router will be told to wait, and so it goes on, until the data finally gets to the destination, but it's too busy to handle all of the requests, process them, and respond to them? For example, if you set up a web server on your machine at home, because your outpipe is only 1mb/s, if 20 people wanting to access your web pages are on 20gb/s pipes asking for a 1GB file, they are not going to get it at 20gb/s, as your computer will have to share 1mb/s between all 20.

Bandwidth is how much you can throw out or take in at a single point in time. Latency is the amount of time that data then takes to travel to its destination and then come back again - response time.
 
Even if you had a fibre optic cable running between a person in Tokyo and a person in London, directly connecting their two machines, you will have some latency, because light can only travel at a maximum speed.
 
I'll try to put it another way, these analogies are not always helpful though, as they only give an idea, they don't map correctly on the technical level.

Say I have a restaurant with 200 tables, all full. I have 1 chef, and I have 10 waiters. The waiters are my bandwidth, as they physically represent how many orders can be taken at once and how many plates of food can be delivered at once. If I up the number of waiters, then I up my bandwidth, if I decrease my number of waiters, I lower my bandwidth. That's stuff in and out at any one time. If half of my waiters have a limp however they cannot travel with the orders or the plates as fast as the other half that don't have a limp, so here we are introducing latency. Then you have the second type of latency which is processing, or the chef in this case. He can only cook so much at any one time. It doesn't matter if you have 1 waiter or 200 waiters, the processing of the data is fixed. Increase the number of chefs and the more orders can be processed, decrease the number of chefs, the less can be processed, thus the whole turnaround of the food order changes, even though the ability to deliver it in terms of taking orders and carrying plates does not.

Bandwidth is not speed, it's how much can be moved at once. Latency is how long it takes to process and move it.
 
WeasteDevil said:
I'll try to put it another way, these analogies are not always helpful though, as they only give an idea, they don't map correctly on the technical level.

Say I have a restaurant with 200 tables, all full. I have 1 chef, and I have 10 waiters. The waiters are my bandwidth, as they physically represent how many orders can be taken at once and how many plates of food can be delivered at once. If I up the number of waiters, then I up my bandwidth, if I decrease my number of waiters, I lower my bandwidth. That's stuff in and out at any one time. If half of my waiters have a limp however they cannot travel with the orders or the plates as fast as the other half that don't have a limp, so here we are introducing latency. Then you have the second type of latency which is processing, or the chef in this case. He can only cook so much at any one time. It doesn't matter if you have 1 waiter or 200 waiters, the processing of the data is fixed. Increase the number of chefs and the more orders can be processed, decrease the number of chefs, the less can be processed, thus the whole turnaround of the food order changes, even though the ability to deliver it in terms of taking orders and carrying plates does not.

Bandwidth is not speed, it's how much can be moved at once. Latency is how long it takes to process and move it.
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:lol::lol: limpy waiters.
 
It's also obviously going to take longer to move the food order from the table furthest from the kitchen and deliver the plates to that table than it would be to the table closest to the kitchen, especially if dealt with by a limpy waiter. Then, you could have Stephen Hawking ordering a massive steak on one table and a big fat Yank ording the same on another. It would take Hawking 3 hours to eat it, yet the big fat Yank would obviously swallow the whole thing at once in 20 seconds flat. A serious difference in latency to the whole system.
 
WeasteDevil said:
It's also obviously going to take longer to move the food order from the table furthest from the kitchen and deliver the plates to that table than it would be to the table closest to the kitchen, especially if dealt with by a limpy waiter. Then, you could have Stephen Hawking ordering a massive steak on one table and a big fat Yank ording the same on another. It would take Hawking 3 hours to eat it, yet the big fat Yank would obviously swallow the whole thing at once in 20 seconds flat. A serious difference in latency to the whole system.
Click to expand...

Your analogies are brilliant :lol:
 
amolbhatia100 said:
So because I'm further away there's no way for me to game without lag? Surely a fast connection takes care of that, doesn't it?
Click to expand...

No it doesn't. The fast connection tells you how much data you can send and receive in a certain amount of time.

However latency is something different and can depend on a few things, firstly how far away you are and secondly how well your provider routes data. For example if I send a bit of data to google.co.uk, it does not go straight to google. It first makes a few stops at other destinations who all then point it in the right direction and eventually it will get to google, then google will send some data back and it will follow the same path. Sometimes as it is going through these destinations one might feck up and not send the data in the right direction and this is called packet loss. However in some cases one destination might be acting very slow so this will hold things up. The ping it how long it takes for you to send some data to a site and then receive a response back.

Some internet providers route the data very good, so for example if I send some data to google it will make 4 stops and be there, however with another ISP it might 8 stops. This all introduces delays as firstly it has to go through more stops which naturally will delay things but also more chance of one of them messing up and either delaying or losing your data.

All a faster connection does is increase your capacity to receive and send so you can download more in a shorter time.
 
Hey lads, can anyone help me with a problem with PSN? I just got a PS3 a few days ago for Christmas so I don't know much about this kind of thing. I set up a PSN account but I can't sign in, every time I try it takes ages and then throws up a message saying "An error has occured. You have been signed out of PlayStationNetwork. (80710B23) What should I do?
 
I couldn't sign in yesterday. It kept telling me I had to sign in before I could sign in, and then reverting me back to the sign in screen...which I wasn't allowed to cancel out of unless I signed in.
 
amolbhatia100 said:
So because I'm further away there's no way for me to game without lag? Surely a fast connection takes care of that, doesn't it?
Click to expand...

If you are using a DSL connection you can ask your ISP to turn off interleaving on your line. This will usually decrease your latency by about 10%, the reason they turn on interleaving is to provide a better quality of service but if you have a stable connection with little packet loss then there is really no need for it to be turned on.
 
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