Before you blame your ISP for sub-par gaming speeds look inside

Everyone likes to blame their ISP for slow speeds, choppy video, pixilated video streams and MP3 streams that sound like a dirty and broken vinyl record with skips and pops.  Some of these symptoms can be caused by your broadband provider but some originate inside your own computer.

Make sure you have the latest operating system updates.  Also check and see if your drivers are the latest, particularly the network drivers.

Turn off miscellaneous programs and everything you are not using.  Many programs like Adobe Acrobat, WinZip, Java Updates, Skype, ZipScript, WordSearch, Picasa and others run in the background, so shut them off.

Turn off automatic disk search indexing and go through all the system settings that may affect speed.  There are many game optimization programs out there, but I prefer to do mine manually.  That way if you mess up, you know what you did.  You will not get that with some of the automated programs.

Find out what the maximum size memory your computer can support and buy enough memory to max it out.  Defrag your boot hard drive.

Make sure you hard drive is under 80% full.  Power down your system and check the speed and look up the throughput.  Buy the fastest drive with the best throughput you can afford and swap it out after duplicating the drive image on the new drive.  Ghost and other programs can make this copy fro you and automatically adjust for the new size.

Next on the list is your video card.  A slow card or one without a large memory and acceleration will cause your game to wait on the video card and wait time is bad in a live game.

Buy the best video card you can afford.  You can spend anywhere from $150.00 for a decent video card to over $1,000 for a really good one.

Now we come to the part you were waiting for: the network connection so you can blame your ISP.

I found a good test to run that will tell you what is going on with your network connection: Run NDT.  This is a Network Diagnostic Tool and it provides a detailed look into your network connection.

This is not just a speed test, but also examines the network and your system.

To give you an idea of what this tool can do for you, I took a medium-class business desktop computer and ran NDT on it on a Comcast triple-play service with some surprising results.  {My comments will be orange in color.}

So here it is and you can do the same with your computer.

Run NDT

Click on the DETAILS tab.

Your system: Windows Vista version 6.0
Java version: 1.6.0_21 (x86)
TCP receive window: 65535 current, 65535 maximum
1.0E-6 packets lost during test {packet loss can definitely affect your gaming experience}
Round trip time: 23 msec (minimum), 128 msec (maximum), 38.06 msec (average) {100 ms or less is considered good for high speed gaming, so a 38.06 ms is great.}
Jitter: 105 msec {Jitter of l0 msec or less is desirable for gaming}
0 seconds spend waiting following a timeout
TCP time-out counter: 265
0 selective acknowledgement packets received

No duplex mismatch condition was detected.
The test did not detect a cable fault. {Real bad for any use.}
No network congestion was detected. {This can happen in the evening when the kids are home from school, particularly on cable systems.}
No network addess translation appliance was detected. {Yea, they misspelled “address”.}

0.0494% of the time was not spent in a receiver limited or sender limited state. {Ideally and in a perfect world this number should be in the high 90’s.}
94.51% of the time the connection is limited by the client machine’s receive buffer. {Time to get a separate network card with as large as buffer memory as you can find.  Don’t worry about a 1 Gbps (1,000 Mbps) interface unless you like blazing speed on your local network and have a switch that supports 1 Gbps speeds.}
Optimal receive buffer: 67107840 bytes
Bottleneck link: 45 Mbps T3/DS3 subnet {I do not see this as a problem unless 10,000 subscribers on my local net are all playing WoW at the same time.  The network would become congested before this was a problem.}
0 duplicate ACKs set

Click on the ADVANCED tab and scroll down to the bottom.  You will see some interesting information.

The theoretical network limit is 33636.42 Mbps {Yes, a 33.6 Gbps network would be great, but remember this is theoretical number and could not possibly break the laws of physics to achieve this speed.}

The NDT server has a 84.0 KByte buffer which limits the throughput to 39.76 Mbps {Yes, the M-Lab server has limits.}

Your PC/Workstation has a 63.0 KByte buffer which limits the throughput to 15.09 Mbps  {A network card with a bigger buffer would help if the network was not limiting the speed, so I can save some money until I get a faster speed network.}

The network based flow control limits the throughput to 15.47 Mbps {Comcast is limiting the top speed I can access at 15 Mbps or so.  I do not know of any on-line web-based game that requires more than 15 Mbps speeds.}

Client Data reports link is ‘OC-12′, Client Acks report link is ‘OC-12′

Server Data reports link is ‘OC-48′, Server Acks report link is ‘T3′

So now you can see how to recognize where your equipment and network degrade your gaming experience.

Last photo from Flickr.  Photo credit: epugachev