What makes a router lag?

[cyric_74]

I have an RT-N16, by all accounts a pretty decent router.

I share my connection at the house with a fair number of people and have a higher than average high speed cable connection.

The reason I ask is for gaming (specifically league of legends). For a long time I would have lag due to the other traffic on my network. Until I started using QOS. And, it works wonders, I can torrent and play and have who knows what else going on on the network and it's reasonably lag free.

But sometimes if I have skype and a few things going, I will end up with some lag and be forced to shut things down.

But the other day I was at a gaming cyber cafe and they have their 20+ machines, everyone online and seemingly lag free for all.

How?? I mean, they can't have set up QOS for the variety of different games/apps everyone was using to each individual PC there.. ?

I am guessing they just have a router that's more capable?
Is it the router, if so, what qualities enable this? A faster CPU? And/or what can you guys recommend?

thanks

 

[stevech]

I have an RT-N16, by all accounts a pretty decent router.

I share my connection at the house with a fair number of people and have a higher than average high speed cable connection.

The reason I ask is for gaming (specifically league of legends). For a long time I would have lag due to the other traffic on my network. Until I started using QOS. And, it works wonders, I can torrent and play and have who knows what else going on on the network and it's reasonably lag free.

But sometimes if I have skype and a few things going, I will end up with some lag and be forced to shut things down.

But the other day I was at a gaming cyber cafe and they have their 20+ machines, everyone online and seemingly lag free for all.

How?? I mean, they can't have set up QOS for the variety of different games/apps everyone was using to each individual PC there.. ?

I am guessing they just have a router that's more capable?
Is it the router, if so, what qualities enable this? A faster CPU? And/or what can you guys recommend?

thanks

Your games want low latency and delay ('lag'). Most of the delay is inherent in the Internet path to the game server.
Your main thing to do at home is don't use WiFi. It adds delay as neighbors and so on are competing with you for air time. WiFi delay can be lessened by choosing a different channel; 1, 6, 11, in 2.4GHz. But truly, don't use WiFi.

If others on your WiFi or wired network are streaming and doing heavy traffic, there's little you can do. Some high end non-consumer routers try to prioritize gaming traffic ahead of other. But at best it's not a good solution for a gamer.

 

[sinshiva]

kinda like stevech said, it's likely to do with your internet connection. in my experience, cable is more likely to take a hit from traffic in general than dsl, which is really like an assymetric version of t1, which gets multiplexed off of fiber. with cable, you are sharing a path split between yourself and your neighbors. that path takes a hit, so do you. with a connection like dsl, virtual circuits are used in the telecom infrastructure to give you a relatively pure and direct connection to your ISP, pretty much giving you direct access to their fiber.

of course, cable generally offers greater bandwidth at lower prices, depending on your location. europe is killing the US in connectivity due to the more widespread use of DSL rather than cable, though.

[edit/] basically, even when i had 50mbit down cable, i've never been all that confident in the amount of simultaneous connections you can make over cable. and the latency is always higher than dsl.

 

[jlake]

If you saturate your connection, it will make Qos useless.

Modem, ISP speed, ISP, router, router CPU, Qos, latency, buffer bloat, time of day/night, servers, internet in general, all play a factor too. Most people control what they can control and the rest is out of their hands.

If you google "buffer bloat", there's lots of info.

 

[jdabbs]

If you saturate your connection, it will make Qos useless.

Strongly disagree. QoS can determine what traffic will be dropped. Better your mom's photo uploading than a VoIP call.

 

[cyric_74]

Thanks for the replies all but no one suggests how the internet cafe manages to have such reliable high speed?

Everyone seems to believe it's the internet connection though and not affected by the router at all?

I have a 75 Mb cable connection .. I mean I know it doesn't work out that way but with 7 people online that's still 10 Mb per person.. which should be more than enough for each person to run a few online apps.

 

[jlake]

Yes, your router and modem could be contributing to the problem. Impossible to say how much until you try different routers or modems.

Maybe the cafe is running cerowrt?

http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki


http://youtu.be/NuHYOu4aAqg