Please help with the lag

[Lucrayzor]

Agar.io has been lagging HORRIBLY on my computer recently. What happens is, suddenly the game freezes for about 5-10 seconds, then it jumps forward that amount of time, and I have ZERO control over my cell in that time frame. It has cost me SO many great moments by happening at THE worst possible time. I always make sure nothing else is running on my computer, and I even turned off skins because that apparently helps. Nope, still happens. Someone PLEASE tell what I'm supposed to do to make it stop, I just really don't want to be forced to play on the mobile version, because those physics are awful.

P.S. never mind, the mobile version is lagging too. ? The thing is, from what I've seen nobody else in the server seems to suffer from this...

[Shadow Fox]

You can try to rule out your computer or internet connection. But, it’s probably just another issue related to recent updates. Lag is just part of the status quo with agar.io these days.

---

[Squirrel]

(03-15-2018, 04:09 PM)Lucrayzor Wrote: Agar.io has been lagging HORRIBLY on my computer recently. What happens is, suddenly the game freezes for about 5-10 seconds, then it jumps forward that amount of time, and I have ZERO control over my cell in that time frame. It has cost me SO many great moments by happening at THE worst possible time. I always make sure nothing else is running on my computer, and I even turned off skins because that apparently helps. Nope, still happens. Someone PLEASE tell what I'm supposed to do to make it stop, I just really don't want to be forced to play on the mobile version, because those physics are awful.

What ShadowFax said.

If you want to rule out the internet connection, and your Internet service still uses IPv4 IPs (four #'s from 0-255 delimited by periods), and use WinBlows, you could just open a command prompt, and ping the agar.io server you're connecting to with "ping -r (agar.io server ip)", which will start an extensive ping test, during a period where you're seeing the lag. An hour later, or however much you want to try, just hit Ctrl-C to stop the test, and then look at whether or not there is any packet loss, and what the ping stats are (min, max, average).

[run SPOT run]

also fun things to try...clear your browser cache history and cookies, do a full restart on your machine, try using a different browser (i.e. firefox instead of google...never explorer...), try playing at a different time of day to see if your isp is just overloaded, double check to see that you haven't been bumped onto a server thats wrong for your location.
@Squirrel excellent advice, but maybe provide an example of what would be considered good ping responses, for those of us that wouldn't know
(the lower the number the better i.e. 10ms=excellent 150ms+=you're gonna lag like crazy)
in cmd (command prompt) i just typed ping agar.io and got an average ping of 9ms with 0 packet loss, and agar.io seems to be playing smooth so that's a baseline for what you should expect.

Good Luck @Lucrayzor !

[Squirrel]

(03-16-2018, 08:29 PM)run SPOT run Wrote:  @Squirrel excellent advice, but maybe provide an example of what would be considered good ping responses, for those of us that wouldn't know
(the lower the number the better i.e. 10ms=excellent 150ms+=you're gonna lag like crazy)
in cmd (command prompt) i just typed ping agar.io and got an average ping of 9ms with 0 packet loss, and agar.io seems to be playing smooth so that's a baseline for what you should expect.

Good Luck @Lucrayzor !

Ping response times vary greatly, depending on the sort of internet connection that you have.

For me, for example, nothing pings under 6ms, because the switch I'm connected to only has a thypical Ethernet / 100Mbps capability.

If you have basic DSL service, you could see 120-180ms easily, if you're in a more remote location.

And I can play on the EU servers easily as well, even though the pings are in that range, or even the 200's. You have to keep in mind it's milliseconds (one millionth of a second), which is so danged fast to begin with.

These days there's so many other factors.

I don't know if agma is on cloud servers or dedicated, but I'm guessing cloud, based on the scalability. Cloud brings with it extra advantages, but also cons. Your server could blow up, and your game, connection, and everything transferred to a different virtual server without you being much the wiser.

Often, if such a transfer occurs, there is a .... gap ... (depending on the cloud platform, and preparedness) of several to 10 seconds while the virtual server you were on is officially considered yakked, and you're being handled by a different/newly created server instead.

Far more important though, is packet loss. (Also referred to as 'latency' by us IT-pukes.)

Just one lost packet can create that 3-5 second gap where everything freezes.

-- Explanation --
TCP/IP is the common protocol that most web pages use to establish an intenet presence, and your data stream is divided into "packets" which are numbered.

Your computer keeps track of those packet #'s for each session (one session typically per each place that you're communicating with), and if the next packet comes in for a session that is one higher, it will wait for the missing packet.

After 2 seconds typically, if the missing packet still hasn't come in, your computer's O/S automatically transmits a request to resend the missing packet. If it times out again without receiving that packet, now you figure that your game is "hung", or the like.

If the missing packet is eventually delivered, then you 'recover' with it zipping through everything that happened in the meantime, because your session continues to receive the other packets and places them in a buffer.

Games are typically able to deal with minor amounts of packet loss (1-2%, I'll say), because a missed packet might come in only milliseconds later.

But when there's some sort of issue, either with your connection to your own provider (the most likely), or a hardware issue somewhere between you and the agma server, and you're seeing packet loss greater than 5%, the game will become unplayable.

At this point, you can use the "traceroute" command which, if it works, will return ping packets from successive internet devices that each packet in a stream passes through, giving three "ping" values for each.

Each of these points is referred to as a "hop", and if you see a great increase in the ms times for responses for a single hop, that is likely where the problem is.

(I could go on, but I know how you guys cringe at my long posts. In a computer course, the full extent of this would probably require 3 or 4 classes to cover it all. lol)

[run SPOT run]

that was an awesome explanation @Squirrel except isnt a ms=.001 of a second? thousandths? (something I could easily look up, but choose not to lol) And yeah, I think packet loss has always been the culprit for me (when it wasn't the servers). When it comes to "skip lag", that's where clearing cookies and such helps, your browser's only trying to look at what your doing now instead of looking at everything you've done and trying to figure out what you'll do next lol.

[Squirrel]

(03-17-2018, 04:01 AM)run SPOT run Wrote: that was an awesome explanation @Squirrel except isnt a ms=.001 of a second? thousandths? (something I could easily look up, but choose not to lol) And yeah, I think packet loss has always been the culprit for me (when it wasn't the servers). When it comes to "skip lag", that's where clearing cookies and such helps, your browser's only trying to look at what your doing now instead of looking at everything you've done and trying to figure out what you'll do next lol.

Quite right... a thousandth of a second is right.

I'm glad the rest of it looked alright. (lol)