Ping/Route issues to Achaea last 24 hours or so

Amranu

Looks like routing to Achaea is messed up for some of us. My average ping has skyrocketed 5x over the last 24 hours, and a traceroute seems to suggest that my traffic is being routed to Europe and back. I know I've seen at least one other player that this is happening to. Any idea on if this can be fixed?

Kshavatra

Depending on where the issue is, you might need to talk to your ISP or they might need to talk to their intermediate/backbone ISP. In the past I've found issues like this are usually resolved within a couple of days when enough people complain and/or the offending node is addressed

Amranu

Yeah, I'm in Canada and this issue is also happening for @Atalkez (or was earlier today) and he's nowhere near me geographically, so just thought it would be worthwhile to bring attention to on this end. Also routes are broadcast from downstream from my understanding so this is definitely something that IRE should bug their provider about.

Kshavatra

Amranu said:

Also routes are broadcast from downstream from my understanding so this is definitely something that IRE should bug their provider about.

Makes sense. I haven't touched anything networking related in years so I'm a bit hazy on the details

Amranu

Confirmed that this routing issue exists independently of my connection. See the same thing using digitalocean servers in New York and San Francisco. @Ictinus dunno if this is your thing or not, but figured I'd tag you.

From a server in San Francisco:

From NY:

Tysandr

99 problems and the ping is one.

Veldrin

From just not when we had some very very spotty lag

Caelan

100ms is pretty high for me, actually. I usually chill around 60-80ms.

Trey

      

the fuck am I routing through Stockholm, SE for lmao

Saonji

From NZ. Never actually tracert'd Achaea before, oddly.

Anywhere from ~150-195ms or so is what I've gotten for as long as I can remember.

Caelan

Trey said:

      

the fuck am I routing through Stockholm, SE for lmao

LOL.. now I'ma hack you now that I know you're at 192.168.1.1

Zbaco

Central CA(lifornia) and getting routed through the same telia.net routers...WTF?

Caelan

yeah mine was bouncing over to Europe and back.  Pretty silly.

Kog

1, 2, skip a few, 99, Achaea.

Zbaco

Phaestus

For the record, nobody's being routed through Europe (who shouldn't be). You're looking at cached location data. The IPs that people are calling European have been reallocated in the past few days, and are to a few North American data centers. At a quick glance, nothing looks out of the ordinary on any of these tracerts (nor any of the ones sent in privately).

We've had some reports of intermittent bursts of network lag (which I'll pass along to the right folks), but bursts of network lag that aren't gamewide (or at least simultaneously affecting several players) are very likely intermittent ISP issues, and out of our hands.

Tysandr

I diagnosed my problem, and it’s because I live in effin’ Australia. 😆

Sobriquet

Tysandr said:

I diagnosed my problem, and it’s because I live in effin’ Australia. 😆

Australia: Where even the Internet will kill you. 

Archaeon

I wonder if people are, say, checking inventory with, say, 250 individual tarot cards in them. Not that I know that would cause lag @Phaestus .....

Amranu

@Phaestus one thing we noticed yesterday in discussions on Discord is that a lot of players are seeing 3-5x the ping to Achaea than to any other IRE game. This is a pretty recent change and has been consistent since I posted this (I personally see 17ms to Aetolia and 84ms to Achaea, whereas I used to see something closer to 17ms to Achaea)

There's definitely _something_ up.

Amranu

I'm going to go ahead and document this here. This is from a vps I have been using in Chicago to proxy in recently (it reduces my ping time to Achaea by ~30ms which is nice). Since it's in Chicago it's extremely close to IRE's servers, but you can see the route and ping times are wildly different between games. In this case I'm comparing Aetolia ping/route to Achaea:

Phaestus

Latency on Achaea is going to be somewhat higher than other IRE games (around 20-40ms extra for most players). It's entirely expected, and it's not something we can change or fix.

Zbaco

Phaestus said:

Latency on Achaea is going to be somewhat higher than other IRE games (around 20-40ms extra for most players). It's entirely expected, and it's not something we can change or fix.

Why is this?

Amranu

@Phaestus @Sarapis so it's been about 6 months since whatever change was done on the backend introduced a minimum ping time of 25ms or so to Achaea's servers, and significantly increased ping times for the entire playerbase. Do you guys have any plans to fix this? Perhaps by moving whatever you're doing to our traffic onsite so that your premier product doesn't have the worst ping times out of all your products?

Treyal

So, the difference in routing is that Achaea is going through Zenlayer and Aetolia (and other games) aren't.

If I had to take a guess (based on the fact that you /usually/ use something like Zenlayer to reduce latency not add it, lol), the primary purpose is as an anti-DDoS mechanism, probably in response to whatever happened in ANNOUNCE 5203, and there aren't a lot of options here that don't add some amount of latency. Especially given that DDoS protection for non-standard traffic (think, anything that isn't a website) is usually stupid amounts of money.

The specific reason for the latency is that traffic to Achaea needs to route towards the nearest Zenlayer point-of-presence rather than the actual most efficient route, and there's no real solution to that if my guess above is right.

Lyrin

There are likely common sense or even contractual restristrictions on discussing details of anti DDOS measures, so the admin silence on this front isn't particularly surprising.