Friend getting weird lag when on my dedicated server.

First, here's my setup:

I have this computer both running my game and the dedicated server. The specs themselves aren't the issue (24GB ram, i7 processor, 970 GPU). The game for me runs smoothly with the exception of a few unrelated issues. As far as my connection goes, it's 60mbps down/5mbps up. I'm not doing anything else on the internet, and I'm connecting locally so it's not using my bandwidth. His average download from me (my average upload to him) is around 192KB/s, which falls within my limits. I don't ever really drop below the 5mbps I get, as far as upload goes.


So here's a list of stuff I do know:
# The latency between us is fine, I've monitored that
# There are no CPU intensive, memory intensive, GPU intensive, or network intensive tasks going on when the lag happens.
# The lag comes in waves. It will be fine, then it's not. It's not centered around any game activity, it can happen when we're just moving a small ship even.
# His game used to run fine, about a week or two ago, and we haven't added much to the world since then that would account for this drastic of a change.
# There is no packet loss between us.
# I have done maintenance on the save to delete stuff too far away, and have deleted all the floating objects that are just orphaned using SEToolbox, so the world is fairly clean).


When he lags it essentially looks like the connection between us is dropped. We have monitored the network connections between us as far as the game is concerned, and when he lags the send/receive rates between us (only for the game) drop to basically nothing. It's as if the connection is being dropped, and then re-established. However, when he's lagging, I can still see him doing stuff just fine. For instance, he can take our welding ship and fly it sideways down a set of unfinished armor blocks and on his screen none of them are done, but on mine they are all finished. Him having moved in a steady, non-rubberbanding or teleporting way.

On both of our games, the sim speed and all of that are fine. No changes in that stuff that would indicate the lag. I haven't timed it, but it basically phases in and out fairly frequently, for no apparent reason (We could literally be welding a wall, or moving a ship, and it works fine for a while then suddenly he gets lag, then it works fine again, and so on.)

I'm not honestly sure what to check next. I can't point to anything that would be causing this. Periodically I will get the "no connection in (X) seconds", but he doesn't get that, and me getting it is not in sync with his lag. They appear to be separate, and I don't have his kind of lag at all (There were a couple of times I would be welding and it would say blocks aren't done but were, restarting the server fixed that and it hasn't happened in a while.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

p.s. The forum quote button seriously looks like it should be for editing. I constantly click it for editing and just quoted my own post.. lol

 

I'm getting this "lag" too, even in singleplayer. game runs fine for some seconds, then slows down for 1 or 2 seconds, runs fine, slows down. kinda annoying because I need to re-start to fix it for 30 minutes or so.

 

I'm not sure how much restarting it is helping him. It seems to happen less frequently if I don't make the game a dedicated server - we played in a creation game last night just to mess around with a theory, and it seemed to work alright. It seems kind of focused around the game or server just dropping his connection and re-establishing it.

 

In case it helps, it seems to be happening every minute and a half / two minutes.

 

Do you monitor TCP AND UDP? This sounds like a security issue. Do you use firewalls? Does the router use a firewall?

 

We were both monitoring our network activity with process hacker, which gives the bandwidth for both total, afaik (network send and receive rate under the process tab). I use comodo firewall, but have tried disabling it. Generally my computer is pretty locked down, I have comodo set to disallow anything I don't specifically make a rule for. He doesn't use one. Both of our routers just have the standard built-in firewall for home routers, nothing special.

I have tried running malware scans on his system, and it didn't really find anything. Though, I should run an AV scan on it too.

You say it might be a security issue, could you be a bit more elaborate as to your thought process? I wouldn't mind having a direction to look into, and that's a pretty wide one.

 

Hey, just realized I never updated this thread.

I managed to fix the problem. The issue was the fact that we had 80 refineries, and 110 arc furnaces. I didn't realize this because he was gone the week I set it all up, so I forgot he wasn't there to initially say "Hey that's lagging after that".

Since then I turned the refine speed up 10x and reduced the number of refineries to 8, and arc furnaces to 7. Doesn't seem to be lagging at all after this.