World of Warcraft causes router lockups

[Nebiroth]

Hi I just upgraded my service from Base to Mid. Very happy with that.

World of Warcraft works fine, with very low pings, no problems except that after a few hours gaming suddenly I get disconnected from the server. And then nothing else will work either, such as web browsing. The connection is still there but nothing happens. Repair won;t get past getting IP address. Restarting the PC established the connection to the router, but ditto problem.

The only thing that works is rebooting the router.

It's not amount of traffic, as I downloaded the 640Mb Wow patch without problems.

I've encountered this, sort of, where working on the PC for a long time, suddenly, nothing would work, but rebooting the PC cured that.

This time it definitely seems a router thing.

I should add that in the seven months I've had Sky BB, I've never had to reboot the router. Had to do it twice today, both times during Wow sessions.

[richone54]

when on base you would have been capped (2meg) now you are on mid your cap will have changed, this change may have an adverse affect on your line (your errors may be building up)

have a read of the first link in my sig - read about the Mognuts utility for how to post your detailed stats

(note once you have read it i think the link is broke - use this Mognuts)

[Nebiroth]

Thanks. It does seem odd that the day before I ran a huge upload/download (added up to over 1Gb) without any problems. It's only after playing Wow and getting disconnected from the server, that I get this "hung router" problem (or whatever it is!

On the other hand, the connection seemed a bit "flakey" last night after a brief Wow session (I logged out after about an hour), but this morning it is fine (without router rebooting)

The odd thing is that Wow itself is not a heavy traffic generator - it is quite efficient (you can actually play it over dialup, although not particularly well).

I'd have thought if anything was going to cause the router to baulk it would have been that massive upload/download exercise (Wow Downloader uses Torrent so you get a lot of upload traffic as well...at least, until you throttle it down )

Just installing some utils, and will post the router stats when I can.

[Undecided Adrian]

It sounds like your experienceing a known problem, the signal to noise ratio of the line starts off good in the morning and as the day progresses gets worse and worse until it drops below a certain value (around 6 dB) and then your connection becomes unusable due to the large amounts of errors on the line.

Unlike many other routers the netgear one that sky uses doesn't track the signal to noise ratio to keep it at a steady level, when it crashes out you need to go into the router status page (192.168.0.1) and do a manual reset and that will reset the router and adjust your settings to give a noise ration of about 7 dB.

What you can try is to reset your router about 11pm-midnight when the noise is at it's worse and then you shouldn't need to reset the router as much.

[Nebiroth]

It's weird and it's definitely Wow related. I just logged out of Wow and found that I couldn;t browse or anything. It couldn't even do address lookups let alone load web pages. I prodded around in the router and couldn;t find any obvious problems, didn't do a reset or anything like that. Clicked on Connection Status, it looked fine, and then everything started working...

Very, very strange.

[Hely]

Hi

Just for info , I am on the max package and play WOW with out any problems.
Can log on at 1900hrs and still be connected come 0200hrs in the morning.
(Yes I have no life LOL)

But I have had my max delays reduced to 8 and my line capped.

[Nebiroth]

I kept track of the stats and it;s the noisy line. Last night the connection dropped having been good most of the day, at around 7pm which is probably a peak time, and the SNR had dropped to 4.2!

I rebooted and the router renegotiated, the speed was lower (not a problem). This morning, the SNR is over 12.

Thanks for the pointers guys.

I will keep doing this until I establish a stable working speed.