LAG

Lag is the worst aspect of mudding, gaming and the Internet in
general. If you do not know what lag means, it generally means that the
network (Internet) or some place between where you are and where you're
going is congested.

Lag is very rare on Medievia. A lot of time and money has been spent on
ensuring that Medievia is as lag-free as possible. Most games lag
because their computer cannot keep up with the game. Medievia runs on
a farm of powerful XEON machines. These machines are well-suited to
running a game. The last time we profiled it, at 900 players online the
game was using just 34% of of our machines' power.

Another way games lag is by not having enough bandwidth to the Internet.
Medievia is on a very fast T1 trunk line.

The last way a mud can lag is to have someplace between you and us that is
"Lagging". It could be a major Network Access Point (NAP) is failing, it
could just be one flaky router in Sprint's network. Any of a thousand things
could be standing between you and a fast gaming session. This is the most
common form of lag you will experience at Medievia.

To find out where the lag is coming from, do the following:

If you are running Windows 95/98 or Windows NT, load up a DOS window and
type:

tracert -d medievia.com

If you do not use a -d the data you are looking at will be terribly skewed
because you have it looking up the names of the machines.

The tracert command will give you output that is something like the following:

C:\WINDOWS>tracert -d medievia.com

Tracing route to medievia.com [205.147.247.36] over a maximum of 30 hops:

1   166 ms   134 ms   159 ms  205.147.251.4
2   130 ms   159 ms   154 ms  205.147.251.1
3   165 ms   138 ms   156 ms  206.245.159.33
4   149 ms   157 ms   140 ms  198.69.204.100
5   179 ms   161 ms   215 ms  206.245.154.22
6   169 ms   158 ms   175 ms  205.147.247.36

Trace complete.

The information you are firstly interested in is the time each 'hop' is taking
in milliseconds, or ms. Line 1 is the time it takes to get from your machine
to your ISP (if you use a modem) or to your local router if you are in a LAN
environment. For modem users, like the above example, the biggest part of
the time will be this first segment. The three numbers in ms on the first
line are three 'ping' attempts to the first hop.

Line 2 is the next hop. It takes almost the same amount of time to get there
as it does the first. Not unusual as these times are not 100% accurate.

What you are looking for is a big change between two lines. A difference of
100 would be quite big. So if one line averages about 150ms and the following
is about 250, then there is a problem between those two lines.

The number in the right hand column is the IP address of the routers that are
reporting back to the tracert command.

There is no lag in this example.

If you did see a big change somewhere, you would want to do another tracert
command without the -d parameter. This would show you the names of the
machines so you could see where the problem was. For example:

C:\WINDOWS>tracert medievia.com

Tracing route to medievia.com [205.147.247.36]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1   162 ms   166 ms   134 ms  max1.phl.fast.net [205.147.251.4]
2   157 ms   133 ms   159 ms  gw-phl-fe1.phl.fast.net [205.147.251.1]
3   159 ms   136 ms   158 ms  core02-abe-hssi0-0-0.nerep.net [206.245.159.33]
4   140 ms   156 ms   138 ms  bcn01-abe-fe01.FAST.NET [198.69.204.100]
5   168 ms   137 ms   157 ms  gw-intersphere-768.sync0-0.BlueBell.FAST.NET [206.245.154.22]
6   163 ms   158 ms   173 ms  medievia.com [205.147.247.36]

Trace complete.

The last one or two hops, medievia.com and anything with 'intersphere' in it
are the only places where the lag would be from our network. Everything else
is our ISP or further away, and not in our control.