Hi Nanog, We have recently introduced a MMORPG (online game) to the Internet. We currently are receiving many complaints from UK (and a few EU) customers of sudden traffic loss or slowness which makes the game unplayable. The complaints come through like clockwork from 6:00PM to 11:59PM (GMT). Our chief complaint customers originate from British Telecom who equate to an aggregate estimate of 200Mbps during said hours. Is there any advice, known traffic shaping bucket or predictive traffic shaping of sorts that could be impeding our customers use over our ports TCP/7000-7500? Would our traffic be considered P2P traffic and throttled once inside their ASN (or even outside)? Understandably ISPs would want to protect the precious bandwidth and IP services. We are based in US but I am at a wits end on route shifting over our major ISP connections and finding no resolution. Is there anyone who has experienced cross-the-pond issues such as this and had had luck in finding a resolution or at least an answer? (Maybe a form to fill out for cut-through allowance/whitelist for our prefix and port range, if such a thing existed?). Much obliged, Jake
Hi Jake While I cannot confirm officially, there is a lot of rumors, that several larger UK ISP's are throttling traffic at that time period. I am not sure who to contact, but the individual ISP's to solve this, from your point, maybe another NANOG'er knows. Lasse -----Original Message----- From: Jake Vargas [mailto:jvargas@crypticstudios.com] Sent: 10. september 2009 09:54 To: 'nanog@nanog.org' Subject: Traffic Shaping on ISPs Hi Nanog, We have recently introduced a MMORPG (online game) to the Internet. We currently are receiving many complaints from UK (and a few EU) customers of sudden traffic loss or slowness which makes the game unplayable. The complaints come through like clockwork from 6:00PM to 11:59PM (GMT). Our chief complaint customers originate from British Telecom who equate to an aggregate estimate of 200Mbps during said hours. Is there any advice, known traffic shaping bucket or predictive traffic shaping of sorts that could be impeding our customers use over our ports TCP/7000-7500? Would our traffic be considered P2P traffic and throttled once inside their ASN (or even outside)? Understandably ISPs would want to protect the precious bandwidth and IP services. We are based in US but I am at a wits end on route shifting over our major ISP connections and finding no resolution. Is there anyone who has experienced cross-the-pond issues such as this and had had luck in finding a resolution or at least an answer? (Maybe a form to fill out for cut-through allowance/whitelist for our prefix and port range, if such a thing existed?). Much obliged, Jake __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature database 4412 (20090909) __________ The message was checked by ESET Smart Security. http://www.eset.com __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature database 4412 (20090909) __________ The message was checked by ESET Smart Security. http://www.eset.com
While I cannot confirm officially, there is a lot of rumors, that several larger UK ISP's are throttling traffic at that time period. I am not sure who to contact, but the individual ISP's to solve this, from your point, maybe another NANOG'er knows.
Hi Lasse, Thanks for the reply. We wrote an app to reveal troubles. Just to satisfy any curiosity and get some facts out, I will provide a real world example (1 of many) from a direct test of one of our BT sourced customers (this is from a 08-29 test at ~22:04 hours GMT): Date IP RTT Port ActualRecv NicSent NicRecv 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 80 199 13 214 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 80 199 13 214 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 443 200 12 215 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 443 199 12 214 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7255 2 2 5 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7255 3 1 4 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7003 3 2 5 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7003 4 1 5 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7202 27 3 32 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7202 24 2 29 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7499 27 3 32 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7499 25 2 31 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 80 195 13 206 Idle NIC bandwidth Send: 0 KB/sec Recv: 0 KB/sec To remove any doubt we also measured idle bandwidth utilization on the NIC when the test wasn't run to remove any other culprit such as torrent download, A/V streaming and etc in the background. In this case, 0/0 on idle use. All results are in KBytes I withheld the actual IP address of this test and replaced it from the source prefix. We have quite a few iterations of similar results from other source addresses from this prefix alone. All appear to exhibit the same issue. I've already written British Telecom and they never replied.
BT/Virgin throttling information: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/virgin_media_throttle_extension/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/07/bt_samknows_bandwidth_throttling/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8077839.stm http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/5431052/BT-admits-limiting-downlo... It looks like the throttling window lines up fairly well with the times you're seeing problems. Now, if that's the throttling, or just BT's network being oversubscribed... who knows. Good luck getting your problem cleared up. ---- Harrison Grundy On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Jake Vargas<jvargas@crypticstudios.com> wrote:
While I cannot confirm officially, there is a lot of rumors, that several larger UK ISP's are throttling traffic at that time period. I am not sure who to contact, but the individual ISP's to solve this, from your point, maybe another NANOG'er knows.
Hi Lasse,
Thanks for the reply. We wrote an app to reveal troubles.
Just to satisfy any curiosity and get some facts out, I will provide a real world example (1 of many) from a direct test of one of our BT sourced customers (this is from a 08-29 test at ~22:04 hours GMT):
Date IP RTT Port ActualRecv NicSent NicRecv 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 80 199 13 214 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 80 199 13 214 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 443 200 12 215 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 443 199 12 214 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7255 2 2 5 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7255 3 1 4 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7003 3 2 5 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7003 4 1 5 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7202 27 3 32 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7202 24 2 29 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7499 27 3 32 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 7499 25 2 31 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10 103.5 80 195 13 206 Idle NIC bandwidth Send: 0 KB/sec Recv: 0 KB/sec
To remove any doubt we also measured idle bandwidth utilization on the NIC when the test wasn't run to remove any other culprit such as torrent download, A/V streaming and etc in the background. In this case, 0/0 on idle use. All results are in KBytes
I withheld the actual IP address of this test and replaced it from the source prefix. We have quite a few iterations of similar results from other source addresses from this prefix alone. All appear to exhibit the same issue.
I've already written British Telecom and they never replied.
participants (3)
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Astrodog -
Jake Vargas -
Lasse Schmidt