Reducing lag by optimize your network settings

[nebkas]

Just a short guide to improve your network setings.




Disable IPv6. (Its famous for a lot of trouble in online gaming)



Go to Advanced tab of your Ethernet adapter settings, and disable the following:



Interrupt Moderation - clumps packets together and sends them as a batch - the main offender

Flow Control - sounds counterintuitive to disable it, but it messes with existing flow control in Windows networking stack



Receive Side Scaling - also messes with Windows networking stack



[anything goes here] Checksum Offload - supposed to speed up performance by offloading TCP/UDP checksumming to hardware; in reality does nothing for an average desktop PC except interfere with Windows networking stack



UDP Is more important, because 0AD is using the UPD protocoll!


Thats what u can do on your Desktop 

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If you want to go more forward,

you can optimize your Routers config too. Search in the config for something like QoS, Filters, Portforwarding etc. In most routers, you can prioritize network traffic. Just watch out and give realtime priority to the UDP protocoll and bind it to the 0ad port 20595. 

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Want more? 

If your PC have a lot of RAM you are lucky. Try to set up a RAM-Drive and put a Copy of your 0ad into it and run it from there

 

[nebkas]

Sorry, forgot about the WiFi guys 

Try to use the freeware "WLAN Optimizer". This disables the periodical background scan and helps to improve your latency

WLAN Optimizer

 

[elexis]

Thanks for this tutorial, I never considered most of these settings

The wireless folks (wifi / 3g dongle) are known in particular for lagging, usually a problem of signal strength. Moving the router and antenna close to each other, buying a bigger antenna or constructing a reflector with tin-foil can would help a lot.