It has been a herculean effort at problem diagnosis, involving:
- 1 sleepy father
- (moral support + calling up and pre-empting Starhub because somehow a girl's voice makes tech support think of clever questions like: "Is your power switched on? Can you check that all your connections are plugged in properly? Can you reformat Windows?" He gave up at the point when we determined the problem seemed to be with my computer only. Meaning, both hes.)
- 1 extra desktop
- (to finally figure out that hey, when directly connected to the modem, the speed test runs fine at 23 megabits/sec)
- 1 laptop
- (me verifying the next day that yes, indeed the problem seems to lie with my computer only, sighs)
- 1 vacuum cleaner
- (in case dust was clogging up some important component of my hardware - grasping at straws, but what the heck...)
- 1 "stolen" keyboard
- (robbed from my dad's computer, cos my logitech gaming keyboard has one eeny tiny flaw - it can't start windows safemode because the F8, or any other keys for that matter, do not work until the USB port is activated, at which point Windows has started up)
- countless cable modem restarts
- (bout par for the course)
- 8m of ethernet cable
- (to hook up my computer directly to the cable modem, bypassing router and the ethernet cables buried in the walls to take them out of the equation)
- a bunch of bandwidth speed utilities
- (utilities.starhub.com and www.speedtest.net were my favorites)
- several virus scanners and hours of scanning
- (they didn't find nothing. In the slang sense, ie. they found nothing whatsoever.)
- 1 haphazard attempt at disk cleanup
- (just in case 1.8 gigs of swap file were slowing my C drive to the point that download bandwidth was affected. Well, I uninstalled Bioshock and some other things, and I'm now sitting on 10gig free in C and 40gigs free in D. Still no go.)
in no real particular order.
As mentioned above, last night, in between calls to Starhub complaining of slow download speeds and web surfing, and after assuring tech support that we'd hooked up to the cable modem directly, we were led to some bandwidth utilities to test available bandwidth.
My desktop computer stumped everybody by downloading a file from a local Singapore server (probably Starhub's own) at an astoundingly phenomenal pace of 0.18 megabits per second. Slow, that is.
After some messing around, tech support guy asked us to hook up to another computer instead, so my dad hooked it up to his computer, which had previously been giving problems 6 days before (mine started 3 days ago).
Well, the speedtest clocked in at an equally astounding 23 megabits per second. Fast, that is.
"..."
With that revelation, tech support guy said, "Oh, no problems on Starhub's part then. Bye!"
Dad said, "I'm sleepy, and I have an all day seminar to attend tomorrow. It's 4am. Yer on yer own. Good luck!"
:(
So began the process of systematically eliminating every vaguely probable cause I could think of that affected my computer alone.
Lots of virus scans. Just in case something snuck in. But I didn't even remember plugging anything in or doing anything funky within the last 3 days. All I did was start up Steam on my regular daily pilgrimage to see if there were any deals, and one day it didn't work anymore. :/
Cleaned out all the dust, in case something was lying across some vital electronic connection on my ethernet network adapter card.
Ran safe mode, with networking capability, only to find the same sluggish results.
Amusingly, since Starhub had recommended their bandwidth tester, I decided to go the whole hog and test bandwidth with speedtest.net which lets you connect to stuff all over the continents... guess what I found?
Local Singapore server downloaded the test file at 0.14-0.18 megabits/sec.
Malaysian server downloaded the file at 1-2 megabits/sec.
And a server all the way across in San Francisco downloaded at 2-3 megabits/sec.
Hell, my upload speed was faster than my download speed for the local servers.
T'was freaking weird.
I checked the Starhub maintenance message again, and they are STILL conducting server maintenance over the period of 14-18 Dec now.
To me, that suggests they could be doing some tweaks to their packet shaping protocols, because I observed some of my speedtests ramping all the way up to 23 megabits/sec for about 5 seconds, before the bandwidth abruptly throttles down to 0.14 megabits.
There was one last possible difference between my computer and the other two computers which work fine at 23 megabits. About 4 months ago, I'd done a registry tweak to improve Aion's ping, the infamous TCPAckFrequency change from 2 packets to 1 packet acknowledgements.
Perhaps... just perhaps, there was some overly "clever" network engineer at Starhub who assumed that the majority of people leave it on the default and did some tweaks to improve bandwidth traffic, while blocking or ramping down bandwidth of those computers which seemed to talk to their servers too many times?
So I edited the registry again and removed the value. Upon restart of computer and cable modem, my local speedtest shot up to 23 megabits/sec.
"..."
Not believing my eyes, I tried it a few more times, getting less promising results. There was still occasional bandwidth ramp downs all the way to 1-2 megabits/sec, but they weren't hitting the phenomenally insane 0.18 megabits of "speed."
Being a skeptical scientist, I put the TCPAckFrequency value to what it was previously, restarted, and voila, 0.18 megabits of consistent suckage.
So I deleted the value again, replugged everything back to router and country the way it was, restarted, rebooted, and my net connection is... better.
It's still not great. But I'm running Aion (if rubberbanding) while the speedtest is achieving a shaky 2-6 megabits/sec on the local server which consistently coughed up 0.18 megabits with the registry value enabled.
I must have got caught in some bastard's throttle trap. :/
Presumably if I don't tax my bandwidth by a major download while I'm playing Aion, I might be able to achieve websurfing with gaming once more.
Except the reason why I tweaked my registry value in the first place was to lower my latency, which was an alarming 500-800ms in Aion. The Aussies have it worse, 700-900ms, and they've taken to tunnels like Lowerping and stuff.
If I recall correctly, I had 300-500ms ping with the registry tweak.
Now it's back to 500-700ms averages.
It's still playable. Which is more than I can say if I were playing from Aussieland. But well, between the devil of being unable to have enough bandwidth to multitask and getting my ass kicked by Deep Blue (or other similar computer or human enemies), I think I'll pick the multitasking.
*sighs*
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