It's more than that. I don't know the specific details, but I've already done the registry tweak, and this still gave me a significant improvement.

Does anyone know of a similar "tunneling" service for South America? I tried the Australian ones, but, as expected (I'm in Brazil), they didn't do much good.

There is nothing more. Services like these provide a better latency by bypassing the default TCP settings in a out-of-the-box Windows machine. By simply fixing the TCP settings in the Windows registry, you can have the same benefit without shelling out money.


I suggest "Buyer beware" in purchasing these tunneling services. Do a bit of research before you buy anything and definitely run the registry tweaks.

No. If you live within the US these services won't help your performance.

If you live overseas they can helpe tremendously. Think of the big cables on sea floor connecting us to Autrailia (as an example) as a giant multi lane highway. A lot of people are sending their traffic over the same lanes shared with many others and it gets slowed down.

Paying for one of these services is like paying for access to a private highway lane. This lane has a much smaller volume of data running on it and has less latency as a result.

If any of these services have dedicated bandwidth links to the US, it is very curious that none of the websites I have visited (lowerping/wow-tunnels) make any mention of that fact. You'd think their website would be screaming that fact, especially since buying dedicated bandwidth on transcontinental links isn't exactly cheap.

I assume it's something of that variety. Massive latency for overseas people is not caused nor will it be fixed solely by the TCP/IP registry changes.

Well you assume wrong. In fact have a look at the FAQ page on WoW Tunnels and I quote



First of all there is no mention of anything like what you have suggested and secondly that is the most absurd thing I have ever seen. SSH tunneling is used for encrypting and sending data over unsecured networks or to send data from one network to another where is there an incompatible delivery network in between. There is no benefit to gaming from SSH tunneling in fact the process of encrypting and decrypting the packets adds a significant overhead to the whole process.


These people are selling snake oil. Again I repeat the only thing they are doing is bypassing the default config of the TCP stack. You can get same or more benefit by simply editing the TCP settings in the registry.


To reply to the post above RE routing - There is exactly one cable connecting Australia to the US (Southern Cross cable) and hence the latency for any of the providers is more or less the same. The possibility that your ISP's links are saturated is laughable and would affect your entire network experience (torrents, web browsing, media clips etc), in which case you are better off switching ISP's.

Unless WoW tunnels & lowerping have secretly laid another transcontinental cable across the pacific I call shenanigans on this whole industry.

SSH tunneling (through lowerping) has worked wonders for me. I've had my ping drop from 600 to 300 and very tangible in-game response time has been lowered.
The worst you could do is try the free servers and decide for yourself.

As much as what you say is true, the way I understand tunnels to work is that they send the data to the server at a faster rate by bypassing the delay within the wow client and directly sending it to the U.S.

When I used lower ping in arena it made a huge difference with interrupts and also reduced the amount of times I would intercept/charge and not be in range of them to melee. It does make a difference although you will suffer from issues from time to time and either will have to reconnect or stop using the tunnel for small periods. The registry hack has never made any noticeable difference for me.

I did try the free trial and it actually increased my latency. I am guessing that since my TCP stack was already optimal, the latency increase was due to the additional overhead of SSH and routing through a different carrier. I went from something like 220-260ms to around 610ms-680ms.

I play on the EU realms and connect from India. On average, the latency hovers around 500. When I started using the registry fix, it lowered to around 350-400. Ever since I subscribed to Lowerping, my latency rarely (if ever) goes over 250. I don't know if you get a lower benefit since you are closer to your server (if you've even tried it obviously), but for someone who connects from a long distance away, this service actually does make a difference.

While the registry change certainly improved my latency from Australia, using wowtunnels has provided a considerably greater improvement. I was getting high 200's with the TCP setting change, low 200's with wowtunnels. Sometime even sub-200 (my raw ping to their server is 180-185, I've seen in-game latency close to that).

I don't know enough about networking to know why, but the difference is quite visible both in the latency meter and in the feel of the game.

Another thing to consider is that the TCP setting registry change will reduce latency and increase bandwidth usage for all applications on your PC, will it not? Which is not what you want for most things.

p.s. whatever Blizzard did in 2.3.2 never provided as much benefit as the TcpAckFrequency registry change.

People pretty conclusively determined that despite that patch note, 2.3.2 changed nothing. Most people still see a large benefit from making the registry change themselves, or using a tunneling service.

CfosSpeed is a program that replaces the windows ethernet drivers, with a new optimized one. What it allows it to do is control the flow of packets, and spread it out so that you don't have one process monopolizing your connection. You can prioritize this for either ping (smaller, faster packets) or Bandwidth (slower ping, larger packets).

I've been using this program for almost 3 years now, and it's one of the first programs I install whenever I reformat, and most assuredly before I put any games on my computer.

I've seen a considerable 30-40 ping difference (with/without), although your mileage may vary. I can get 6ms on TF2 and CS:S, my ping is normally <30ms in WoW. The true beauty of this thing, is that it stabilizes your ping, and lets you download and upload at the same time without sacrificing latency. I can download at 1.4mb/s and upload at 260kb/s at the same time, and have a in-game ping of 60 (up for ~30) in WoW.

This is a program you have to pay for. But I recommend this program very highly. Once you install it initially, you'll have to make sure that you "Calibrate Line" which will optimize it's behavior to your connection. Also, no worries if you have a Speed Boost on your connection, I have it and it makes it even better

I also see a benefit from the first of the two changes Holyshyit posted. I was arguing that the second (TCPNoDelay) should no longer be necessary, at least if the patchnotes are correct. So unless somebody has a proof that TCPNoDelay=1 without changing TCPAckFrequency has a positive effect on the latency, I'd suggest you don't use it.

I wasn't able to find much info on the mac mini in this thread. I seem to get an fps rate of around 10 fps while running 25 man raids. I have everything in the video setting option turned all the way down. Just this week I ordered another stick of RAM which will put me at 2 gigs of ram and a dual core system. I am hoping this will solve any issues. Has anyone had better success with the mini and tweaking the system?

This would be the 2007-2008 model.

edit:
The Apple Mac mini "Core 2 Duo" 2.0 features a 2.0 GHz Intel "Core 2 Duo" (T7200) processor, a 4 MB on-chip level 2 cache, a 667 MHz frontside bus, 1 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-5300) memory, a 5400 RPM, 120 GB Serial ATA hard drive, a slot-loading 2.4X double-layer "SuperDrive", an "Intel GMA950 graphics processor with 64 MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory", and a bundled Apple Remote.

Intel GMA 950

Afaik the old minis have the same GFX system as the old MacBooks (Intel GMA), which is quite terrible. If you click on the apple top left and go to "About this Mac" you can see all system specs. The good new MacMinis use GeForce 9400M which is arround 200-300% fps increase from Intel GMA. If ur on GMA you will prolly never get more then 15 fps.

I have a 24" iMac with an ATI 2600 HD and I rarely see 15fps in a heroic raid in-combat.

Most of the time I'm in single-digits.

Some numbers of launching WoW on SSD drives from a good SSD article from Mr. Anand himself: The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
Search for "World of Warcraft" and you can find the following segment:

It's a very good article on SSD drives in general and well worth the read considering the topic of this thread. And before anyone else posts about it; yes, we've all seen the Samsung 24 SSD Raid setup, it's hardly that relevant in this thread. However I would like to see the launch speed of WoW from a two Intel X25-E drive raid-0 setup. :)

I just ordered a 300GB Velociraptor drive for my new i7 system yesterday. Do you think going with an SSD would've been a better deal? I've heard so many stories about SSD drives having issues such as stuttering, diminishing write capability etc.

I know the Intel X25-E and M drives are the top brand, but the price just isn't there to justify buying it for WoW purposes.

If you don't want to blow the $300 for an SSD that will fit l your stuff, you might look at this point in the deals thread: http://elitistjerks.com/f30/t41858-p...3/#post1157517

Toss that into your system as a secondary drive and run WoW (and anything else you care about load times in) from it.