Multi player dropping sessions

[Alicatt]

Over the weekend I bought a second licence for ProPE 2.483 for my son as he wants to play along with me. I managed to set up the Codemeter without any problems and have the router set up to forward the ports to my PC on the LAN. So far, so good! Vic can connect with his laptop either via WiFi or by wired connection to the LAN, my PC is wired to the LAN but after about 5 to 6 minutes of play Vic gets a session dropped message and he ends back at the AAR screen, same thing happens if he acts as host only this time it is me that gets dropped back to the AAR.

Vic is running a laptop with Vista Home Premium on an Intel core duo @2GHz with 4Gb RAM.

I'm running Win 7 64 on an i7 965 @3.4GHz with 6Gb RAM.

Router is a DLink DIR-855 and we are both using a 1Gb/s wired connection.

I have tried turning off any speed stepping on the CPUs and also the Statefull Packet Inspection on the router and it makes no diffrence.

[Sean]

If you are both in the same house then don't bother with port forwarding and external ips. Just connect to the internal IP.

If you are not in the same house then try that. If it works then, then theres something wrong with the router or your isp...

[Alicatt]

We are in the same house on the same router.

and have tried as you suggest, I had put in the port forwarding to play over the internet so I tried it with the port forwarding disabled and with the SPI both enabled and disabled still with the same results. I don't have any problems streaming audio / video over the home network from the WHS box to any of the media recievers in the house either wired or via WiFi, while trying Steelbeasts I had the home server switched off to make sure it wasn't traffic from it that was slowing down the lan.

[Sean]

So, you are hosting on 192.168.0.2 and your son is connecting to that internal IP and still disconnecting? In that case, I would say to double check the bios for other settings that involve changing clock speed on both machines. On mine there was speedstep and one other one that had to be turned off, I also removed some motherboard app that controlled the clock adjustments.

[Alicatt]

Thanks, I think that got it, tho I had turned off the speed stepping on Vic's laptop it was on my desktop that needed the speedstep switched off in both the bios and in windows power settings.

PS. he loves the sim:cvcsalut:

[Hedgehog]

Speed step?

Is that over clocking for the rest of us?

[Ssnake]

No. Overclocking is to increase the processor speed beyond the factory settings. Speed Step is a mechanism to put some parts of the CPU that "are not needed at the moment" to sleep or at least to reduce their speed to reduce energy consumption. The problem is, who decides which part of the CPU are "not needed" (it's a piece of software in the BIOS or the chipset, I think),and does that have unintended consequences for other things.

It may well be that, in principle, the SpeedStep software is right in its assessment that the CPU could handle the network traffic, and that it's just the moment of transition that puts the connection out of whack. But from a practical point of view that doesn't matter; SpeedStep must be disabled if it contributes/causes/enables problems.

[Sean]

Exactly the opposite. Speedstep cuts the clock speed of the cpu on the fly if its not busy to reduce energy consumption. Parts of directplay require the clocks to stay consistent for everyone that is connected so if they change it can go nuts.

[Hedgehog]

Ah, okay I'll have a look through the BIOS.

Its an Asus MB so its probably called something weird.

Edit:

I couldn't find anything obviously called Speed Step in the Bios or in the control panel in various places.

However I set the cpu overclock (which i suspect may also control speedstep) thing to standard.

Does anyone know if AMD call speedstep something else?

Edited April 14, 2010 by Hedgehog

[raskil]

Does anyone know if AMD call speedstep something else?

Cool 'n quiet.

[Hedgehog]

Up date:

Cool 'n' quiet is disabled.

So, tis not that causing the issues.

SB does tend to "pause" every 5-10 mins even in offline mode.

Really weird.

Is there any way to specifically assign a sole processor core to SB?

[Sean]

The pauses are caused by the aar being written to disk. Shouldn't take very long unless you have something that is interfering with the process like a virus scanner. Try googling "processor affinity".

[fidelthefallguy]

Is there any way to specifically assign a sole processor core to SB?

yes.

task manager ->right click sb process-> affinity

un- check the cup/core you do not wish to use. SB will just use the remaining core.

problem with this is that all other processes will continue to use said core unless you tell them not to. and if you have an i7 or likes running virtual cores (32 + cores) this can be a pain in the ass to turn off cores for all your processes. there may be some software that can give better control of process affinity, try sf.net or freshmeat

[Ssnake]

Usually it's best to leave it to the operating system.