Help! Is Amazon causing my ping issues??

[angeldawn]

I will start by saying I know almost nothing about the stuff I'm about to talk about.

I have been having ping issues for months (prob more like a year) and I'm so tired of it, so I'm trying to figure it out.

Since I play on my iPad, I downloaded an app to do some tests. One test I did was tracer route. I traced to account.spacetimestudios.com (per Samhayne)

My route to STS is in the attached image. As you can see my test times out along the way. (#7 and then again 11, 12, & 13) We know that STS is hosted on Amazon Cloud. #9 is Amazon and then #14 is Amazon.

So logic tells me, no name stop #7 is causing me a problem and so is Amazon. (Assuming that once I reach Amazon, I'm not leaving their site)

Also while at Amazon, #9 & #10, my ping nearly doubles. Again indicating the problem could be with Amazon.

Since STS is hosted on Amazon is this something that can be fixed by STS contacting Amazon?

Also not sure if this matters but I time out #15-#63 and don't seem to connect after #14.

Any help or clarification on the matter is highly appreciated.

[Shilooo]

Apollo had a guide somewhere. Can't find it now

Thought it was stickied.

[Fusionstrike]

Hey Angel,

I'm not familiar with the tool you're using, but a series of pings along your route like this can be helpful figuring out where issues lie. However, there are a few caveats to be aware of. The first is that this is just one test at a specific time. Sometimes routes become congested or services have problems that are later resolved. It looks like the ping numbers on the right are not cumulative, so the big numbers are the ones to consider "problems". In this screen shot you posted, I would say each node is responding in a reasonable amount of time, although node 10 was slow this one time.

If you ran several tests and saw this same pattern each time, I'd conclude that Amazon was indeed having some kind of problem at the time you were testing. Or perhaps more importantly, I would say it looks like none of the nodes near you are misbehaving, which means "it's not you" having the problem. Ultimately, there's not really anything you can do if Amazon's service is having issues, although it means you don't have to bother calling up your ISP to complain about slow service. If Amazon always has issues like this, STS can call them up and complain as a customer of theirs, but if their games really were suffering from chronic problems, they would definitely already be doing that. Remember, all of their games run on the same Amazon service, so they'd be very motivated to press Amazon for a solution since it would be directly affecting their bottom line.

[angeldawn]

Thanks guys.


@fusion

I actually did this test several times over several hours and again today. It's usually pretty similar.

Location 6 or 7 times out. One Amazon will be ok. One will jump. Then Amazon starts to time out.

Many ppl on PL complain about ping and lag. Of course this is mostly PVP player because yellow ping hardly effects a PVE player but it can make all the difference to a PVP player. If it's red ping you might as well just forget about it.

It has been this way for a while. Ppl just stop complaining about it on the forums.

Once something is wrong for so long it starts to become more acceptable.

[Noi`ya]

pings are blocked by their server to prevent simple ddosing

[angeldawn]

pings are blocked by their server to prevent simple ddosing

Simple ddosing? Sorry I'm completely clueless.

But it's not just blocking ping. It's not retiring any information and my understanding is it's timing out. But I can easily be wrong?

[Noi`ya]

its only blocking your ping requests. pinging a server w/ a bunch of computers is probably the easiest way to take down said server. blocking the ping requests completely stops that.