Internet speed issues while in game.

[Verxi_]

Idk if this is the right place to ask but I have been playing on a vanilla wow private server and its been alright but when I tried to play today my connection was terrible.  I have an addon that displays system info like how much memory usage my addons are using and the up and downloads speed were low but especially the upload speed.  I am currently moving so I don't have my own internet because I am staying in an extended stay type apartment but when I use an internet speed test I get 9.64 MBPS download and 9.26 MBPS upload however the addon ingame says I am only downloading 2.1 KBPS and it says 0 KPBS for the upload.  I am using a dell InspIron 3583 laptop and idk if it could be the issue but I can use the internet just fine and watch twitch streams in 2k without stuttering.  I also did the internet speed test a couple weeks ago and it reported pretty much the exact same results as I got today.  And when I use the resource monitor tool it displays that wow.exe is receiving around 2000B/s but only sending 6B/s.  Idk what the issue is.  I don't have any other games to really test with.  My latency is also in the 1000s because of the low upload speed making it pretty much unplayable.  I would imagine its a windows/wifi driver/card issue though I recently installed a wifi and bluetooth driver about 2 weeks ago.  I don't think it could be the client because I haven't touched it and its been working for multiple months.  And for the server I asked around in my guild which has a couple hundred people playing and nobody was having any specific issues.  It does lag occasionally but its entirely different because the whole server lags including the mobs and everything and its not doing that here.   The server is in western Germany but again I have been playing fine with around 120ms for the past weeks and a couple months ago I was playing on a server in Finland with 135ms.  Any help would be appreciated.

[TheSpokySkull]

Hello!Can you tell me where you are from?

[Verxi_]

Just now, immacat said:

Hello!Can you tell me where you are from?

USA Midwest

[TheSpokySkull]

1 minute ago, Verxi_ said:

USA Midwest

do you have a mobile device? if yes go to settings wifi tap on your wifi and tell me the mbps

[Verxi_]

20 minutes ago, immacat said:

do you have a mobile device? if yes go to settings wifi tap on your wifi and tell me the mbps

I am really sorry for the long wait phone was dead and taking forever to charge.  But i got 9.6mbps download and 8mbps upload.

[Verxi_]

Would really appreciate it if someone could help me out with this.

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, Verxi_ said:

Would really appreciate it if someone could help me out with this.

Could be a lot of things. I mean your playing on a server that is on the other side of the world. The fact is who knows where the issue is. I could be your ISP, it could be a back bone provider or it could be what ever service provider the server is on. On top of the fact your using WiFi. 

 

Does the problem only happen in WOW? What kind of internet do you have (Coax, DSL, Fiber, WISP, LTE/5G, Satellite)? 

[Verxi_]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

Could be a lot of things. I mean your playing on a server that is on the other side of the world. The fact is who knows where the issue is. I could be your ISP, it could be a back bone provider or it could be what ever service provider the server is on. On top of the fact your using WiFi. 

 

Does the problem only happen in WOW? What kind of internet do you have (Coax, DSL, Fiber, WISP, LTE/5G, Satellite)? 

Its cable so I guess Coax?  I suppose your right I just don't understand why its uploading less things then its downloading.  I can feel the effects because I can see everything server side very smoothly.  Its just whenever I cast anything my character has to sit there and channel it for like 800ms - 1500ms at least before he actually does anything which makes it terrible to play and impossible in a sense due to the windows and timings in the gameplay.  It can be really inconsistent too which is why I made this post because it got really bad today though I think it got slightly better. But due to the fact that the server is so far away the upload and download is going to be a lot slower due to that distance.  I imagine if I was using fiber it would be way less.  I just feel like the upload should be more similar to the download and it would be really beneficial if it could be improved.   Though if there is any way to improve things I imagine I would do that with a vpn due to it providing a better route to the server. As for testing another game I would have to download a random game and test it but don't know if that's insightful information. One extra piece of information is that when I click on hardware information in my network settings it says that the receive/transmit is 173/86 but I think that is probably being shared across the other residents because if not then why would I be getting only 9 up and down on the tests.  I also put the priority of wow.exe on realtime though idk if that helps on the network side of things.  If you think there is anything that I could do to improve things or if you need any other information please let me know otherwise thanks anyways!

[Falcon1986]

12 hours ago, Verxi_ said:

I get 9.64 MBPS download and 9.26 MBPS upload

Clarify units: megabits per second or megabytes per second?

 

12 hours ago, Verxi_ said:

And when I use the resource monitor tool it displays that wow.exe is receiving around 2000B/s but only sending 6B/s.  Idk what the issue is.

Online games don't have to utilize the full bandwidth of the connection to work properly, so this is not a good way of measurement. Furthermore, Task Manager isn't meant to measure network connection bandwidth.

 

7 hours ago, Verxi_ said:

Its just whenever I cast anything my character has to sit there and channel it for like 800ms - 1500ms at least before he actually does anything which makes it terrible to play and impossible in a sense due to the windows and timings in the gameplay. 

Distance to the server plays a big role. But I think one of the biggest culprits is WiFi. On your end, at least, it will introduce a lot of latency, especially if there is a lot of interference.

 

If you use ethernet, I'm sure the latency would improve significantly.

 

7 hours ago, Verxi_ said:

Though if there is any way to improve things I imagine I would do that with a vpn due to it providing a better route to the server.

VPNs introduce latency of their own.

[Donut417]

8 hours ago, Verxi_ said:

I suppose your right I just don't understand why its uploading less things then its downloading. 

Well one thing is Cable internet is NOT a symmetrical connection. Case in point, Comcast the largest cable company in the US can do 1.2 Gbps down but only a measly 45 Mbps up. The  highest upload Ive ever seen advertised by a cable company is 50 Mbps. So to answer your question the upload will be less than the download. Furthermore cable internet is a shared connection. What I mean is you are sharing a node with potentially hundreds of people, depending on provider. So when more people are using the connection the slower it can get. 

 

The next thing is online gaming doesn't require a lot of bandwidth. The distance between you an the server plays a big role. ALSO remember that the internet just a bunch of networks connected together. So the route your traffic uses could have changed and this could be the results of that said change. 

 

As mentioned above WiFi is contributing to your problem in some degree. WiFi is convenient but not reliable. 

[Verxi_]

11 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Well one thing is Cable internet is NOT a symmetrical connection. Case in point, Comcast the largest cable company in the US can do 1.2 Gbps down but only a measly 45 Mbps up. The  highest upload Ive ever seen advertised by a cable company is 50 Mbps. So to answer your question the upload will be less than the download. Furthermore cable internet is a shared connection.

While I understand that cable has much more download speed then upload the internet speed test is almost giving me an equal ratio which is not present on the game.  While I was playing today the server announced that people from NA are having connection issues and that they recommend a vpn though someone else said that adds another layer of latency on top of the fact I am using wifi so idk if that's a good option.  But if the route to the server is so bad then I guess I should go that route assuming the added latency isn't too bad.  Now my addon is reporting that I am getting 3.5kbs download but the upload speed is going between 0 and 0.1 kbs still.  I would imagine that the game needs my client to upload almost as much as it needs to download unless the packets are really download intensive and I am getting bottlenecked by that but I don't think that's the case because the download speed went up but the upload is still the same.  So unless that aspect of cable being much more suited for download is playing a part here idk what's going on unless the wifi also is better at downloading then uploading.  And the server is having issues with NA so I don't know if a bad routing to the server favors download speed or something.