About a year ago, I could tell that there were some things that needed to change at home. For starters, I felt really strangely about all the windows on my property, and I knew that I wanted to change them. I began going through and working to make things better, and it was really interesting to invest in technologies that were so beneficial. It made it easy to make sure that my doors were closed and that my windows were locked, and I was grateful for the new technology. This blog is all about home technologies that could help your family.
Whether you're a professional game streamer, a competitive gamer, or an online personality that needs to be on top of gaming news, business is booming for one of the most high tech hobbies on the planet. Online gaming communities come together in ways that few hobbies can imagine across the world, but the online part of the hobby can be a no-fun-allowed challenge. Here are a few network performance issues, quirks, and solutions to help you reduce the technical difficulties of online gaming--or discover a technical hobby that matches your gaming skills.
What Is Lag, And Why Does It Matter?
Lag is the second greatest enemy of gamers, the first being complete disconnects. It has an existing definition in networking, but online gaming is great--albeit frustrating--representation of how lag affects multiple systems.
Lag is a delay, specifically a delay in network resources. When a packet of information slows down, it affects many parts of the network and connected systems that depend on that data. For online games, this usually means moving data about what you're doing to the server, and the server delivering information about what's happening in the world back to your computer.
When your connection is delayed, it means your actions may not arrive in time to have the desired effect. Even worse, actions in the game could be happening without you being able to notice it. There won't be any audio or visual cues to warn you that something is about to happen; anything about the game will be stopped in full increments, not just slower in some kind of reduced speed, molasses-moving mass.
Internal Causes Of Lag
Before contacting your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and demanding a fix, make sure that the problem isn't on your side. This means checking your computer, cables, and networking devices for problems.
At the computer level, make sure that your system and any other systems on the network aren't causing excessive network burden. This means huge downloads that hog the incoming connection or uploads clogging up the outgoing. Viruses can be a problem as well, as they can use network resources to steal data, but smarter and automated hacking usually affects your hardware resources rather than the network connection.
Check your network devices next. Perform speed tests on the computers to check the overall network performance, then standard diagnostic tests that are built into any routers between your computer and the modem. If you don't know where the diagnostics are on your network device model, a network management professional can help you track down the right tabs and commands.
Configuration Changes And Proper Management
If gaming or uploading gaming content is your priority, your traffic has to show it. Networking devices can be configured to prioritize specific network traffic through techniques such as QoS (Quality of Service), and there are multiple layers to QoS performance.
Imperfect QoS can make everything else on the network unstable. Hogging a vast majority of network resources to keep your gaming connection healthy is a waste, and you can expect terrible internet browser and video streaming performance while getting a small improvement without the right changes.
Ideal QoS will reserve a certain percentage of bandwidth (network) capacity for the game, which is based on the maximum that the game will ever use. This is often fairly small, but it can be overshadowed by other, more demanding tasks such as video streaming.
Contact a network management professional to outline the changes needed for an elite gaming network.
Share19 September 2017
