Finding Packet-sniffing programs

By pseudomelon on May 9, 2009 6:27:47 PM from

I've been having ping trouble and have made a couple posts on it, but to sum it all up, I'm getting fine ping in the lobby, then when the game starts it spikes up and hovers around 1k+. It may be packet sniffing, so I'm trying to see if I have any packet sniffing programs. Is there a way to tell which programs are packet sniffing?

I suspect AVG antivirus and Iolo System Mechanic as the culprits, but am uncertain. Anyone know how to disable sniffing on these programs (if they have it)? Note: I've tried disabling Iolo firewall and antivirus, as well as AVG.

Edit: This only happens in matches with 6+ players.

+24 Karma | 11 Replies

I don't think it's related to packet sniffing, at least not on the user side. I have the exact problem and i've tested the game under a fresh Windows 7 (just drivers and Demigod), and it spikes just the same as before.

Did you tried the latest beta patch?

If the next patch doesn't help, i think we will be in that 10% (or 5%, whatever) of users that can not play the game at all and nobody cares about.

Yeah, tried the latest patch The problem continues. At least I have Pantheon and Skirmish.

Don't just disable, uninstall those extra firewalls and AV! Having AV running in the background will lag your game, it's that simple. Try to disable your AV from starting when you start your PC and just use it to scan once a week or even once a month. You could uninstall AV and just install it periodically to check for threats.

Whatever problem you have is shared by me and a smaller group of people around, right down to the only at 6+ players bit.

I can save you some trouble and tell you that I did everything within my power to solve the problem, including disabling and uninstalling, clean installs, direct modem-PC connection with everything disabled, etc., and nothing effected it at all. So basically it's either your/our ISPs or some obscure problem with Demigods netcode.

I could talk to my ISP, but i really, really don't know how to tell them so they understand what's my problem. I can't blame them though, as i'm happy with my net connection because everything works. Just not Demigod.

what happens in SupCom when you play an eight player match? (presuming you have SupCom, that is)

i think your bandwidth might not be enough for actual gameplay; sure you can connect to everyone and send a few packets to people, but what happens when you send a few hundred packets?

a small piece of trivia that i recently learnt; computer networks are just like road network, where as little as a 5% increase in traffic (cars or packets) can push the system into bottlenecking.

i think you should be looking at you upstream and downstream usage whilst in the lobby, and in-game.

I've had my maximum upstream and downstream on my connection tested before, but how do I test how much of it is getting -used-?

[URL=http://www.speedtest.net][/URL]

Use this: http://www.bwmonitor.com/

I've tested it in a 4v4 match, lagging the game with spikes over 1000, and the bandwidth monitor showed only an usage of 17-20 KB/s upload, and that's well in my limit. In a 2v2 game i have an usage of 2-4 KB/s, so it does scale, but i have the bandwidth for it (my maximum upload rate is ~100 KB/s).

So I haven't run into a 3v3 lately, but I tested the program out on a 2v2, and it told me I was using up ~50 kbps. Therefore, would I need to be able to hit 150 kbps for a 5v5? And if so, why would I have a problem when I've got an upload rate of 400 kbps? Maybe I'm reading this thing wrong...

i took my router of the picture completely due to this, but now i'm thinking i was just in a couple game with ppl who caused this issue because I have 0 problems lately (maybe one ppl who caused this stop joining big games?).

Still having issues-- in a 3v3, my usage is 75-100 kb. Any ideas?

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Finding Packet-sniffing programs