Hi @james, I will have a look … i was just online using a wired connection and at first the connection was still dropping then i swapped alts and it suddenly fine … i’m now just about to switch over back to the wifi connection to see if its still happening and look for the information you asked about.
Is it boundless or is it all internet? It sounds like the wifi card on your desktop (or it’s drivers) is bad
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Yeah i don’t think it’s anything to do with boundless or my internet. It only happens on the wifi on the new pc so probably driver/software conflict.
Also could be that there’s obstacles blocking the wifi signals weakening it compared to your laptop’s location. Generally it’s a given that wireless will be less stable/reliable than hard cable connection.
Can you check in your device manager and make sure you only have one set of drivers for your wireless card? If you know how, I would recommend just doing an uninstall of all wireless drivers and then installing the manufacturers driver again, but that can be tricky if it’s on-board wireless.
Hi @Rydralain I think it’s the one highlighted. It 's built into the motherboard which is an Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero
I’m asking about the UDP to TCPIP failover - which would be captured in the game log.
Basically - Boundless attempts to send player input to the server via UDP because it’s likely to be a little faster. But if this fails, then the client will fall back to TCPIP. The process of falling back could cause a little stall.
- We can see in the latency graph that there are periods of UDP traffic in green.
- Then there is a latency spike of ~1s.
- Then ~4s later the UDP traffic starts again.
So what is causing the UDP traffic to stall?
You could try disabling UDP and see if you still get these spikes.
But I would also suggest having a rummage in your router config for UDP settings.
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I’ll also add that it could be something totally independent that it stalling the connection, and this is just how Boundless responds to the stalls.
UDP + TCPIP could both fail, Boundless tries TCPIP only, then retries UDP, and repeat.
I’m not a networking expert - but a very regular pattern does suggest it’s some sort of setup issue. If it was pure Internet weather (locally or remote) then it isn’t likely to be so regular. Maybe it’s some sort of Wifi channel changing issue?
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Hi @james, thanks for your help an advice, you’ve given me a few things to look into and research. My guess is that it’s either something to do with the motherboard driver or a third party application causing the problem, the spikes are extremely regular. I’ll keep Googling to see if anything else turns up. In the meantime I can wire it in but just have to make sure no one trips over the cable.
Now that I think about it, when I first set up the computer and installed Boundless it was running fine over the wifi, then I re-installed a lot of my regular software as well as utilities that came with the pc. It has to be one of them that is causing the problem… not sure how I’m going to find out which one it is though 
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Assuming you’re on Windows I’d try:
- Open the Task Manager.
- Sort the processes / applications by network traffic.
Is there another process that it using bandwidth?
(Again I know very little about networking on Windows, but) I would seriously investigate if something in the Windows Wifi setup or the router Wifi setup (more likely) is causing the connection to reconnect or update frequently. For example (again I know nothing about Wifi’s) maybe your Wifi channel is clashing with another Wifi in the area? What channel your router using? Maybe try fixing this or letting it vary? What is the transmission mode? b/g/n/a/ac/?? I’d try tweaking a few things just to see if you can make it stable. For example switch to a minimal config: 2.4GHz g connection. What about the security protocol? Maybe try altering temporarily?
Basically I’d noodle around with all the router settings until I could isolate which setting appeared to cause this stall every 10 seconds. Then you can try and work out what needs fixing.
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Yes windows 10 … I can see my Christmas holiday is going to be fun 
Thank you again for the advice, lots of good starting places to look into, I hadn’t thought of starting with the task manager.
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If it doesn’t happen on a wired connection but it does happen on wireless it’s definitely the wireless. What kind of wireless AP/router are you using? Is it a little box tucked in the corner or is it bristling with antennae like a hedgehog? Does it provide multiple bands and multiple channels (MU-MIMO)? These modern features are useful when you have multiple devices in your zone all sharing the same radio(s).
Also, make sure you’ve disabled as many ‘phone home’ apps on your PC as you can. If you bought something with a pre-installed OS it’s likely brimming with crapware that tracks everything you do and sends it over the internet to who knows where. You’re often better off reinstalling Windows from scratch to remove that cruft, and then disabling Microsoft’s own cunning observers like Cortana. I say this as someone with exceedingly limited internet bandwidth who has watched about 20% of my precious bytes taken up by unsolicited use.
Consider also the other users of your wifi. If your phone (or someone else’s in your household) is filled with ‘features’ and apps that all dutifully report everything about you all day, and they’re sharing the same radio on your AP, they may affect throughput. You can always try making sure everything else is turned off or not using wifi and see if that makes a difference.
Finally, it could be the hardware or firmware on your PC. Wifi hardware and especially drivers are one of those things in the PC world that are often problematic. Cheap knock-off copies of big-name brands with badly-written drivers cause more headaches than anything but printers. Make sure your drivers are up-to-date is all you can do other than getting a new top-quality third-party wifi card and ignoring the one on the mobo.
Hi @bregma, the router is just a little black box (sky), no antennae on it although there are 2 at the back of the pc. The fact that i can put my laptop right next to the pc and run Boundless on it over the wifi with no problems suggests to me it’s definitely just the wifi on the new pc. It didn’t really come with much bloatware that i could see apart from the usual windows stuff but i have installed some of the utility software that came with the motherboard for controlling the RGB lights on it as well as one for the graphics card and another for the keyboard. For now I’ve decided to just enjoy the Christmas break and run Boundless over a wired connection and worry about it later. The wifi card is built into the motherboard so probably not the best available but the motherboard is an Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero (wifi) which seems to have some pretty good reviews. Because the spikes are so regular, every 10 seconds, my guess is it’s some third party software interfering. If it continues for too long with no solution then I might eventually get a separate wifi card but for now as it’s new I’m going to e-mail the company that built my pc to see what they have to say on the matter.
Better use ducktape For wire… Been there. Kids Love To trip on it 
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I would like to give a big thank you to everyone who has offered advice and suggestions to help resolve this, @Buugi, @james, @DKPuncherello, @Kokuma, @Rydralain, @bregma and I am glad to say that I have managed to resolve the problem. It turned out to be one of the third party utility software that didn’t install properly but was running in the background. It was a program called GameFirst V that was supposed to allow control of prioritising games over the wifi. After uninstalling that and doing a windows update the wifi is now running fine 
This post for me has really highlighted why this games community is one of the best, especially when the head honcho developer, James, was offering advise after nine pm on a Sunday evening with advise for a problem that wasn’t even specifically to do with Boundless. Thank you all again and stay Boundless … and I hope you all have a great Christmas despite what’s going on in this crazy world at the moment.
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The routers that service providers give you are rarely good enough for anything but browsing the web or streaming movies where latency doesn’t matter. I also wouldn’t trust one on my network without an isolation layer under my control, but I’m used to a paranoid level of computer security. I’d suggest you borrow a dedicated quality wifi AP from someone and try that. You would cable it to your provider’s endpoint and either use a different SSID or turn off the wifi on your provider’s router.
The periodic nature of the problem is as likely to be poor compatibility between endpoints (the radio on your PC and the radio on the router) or a driver issue on the PC as it is anything else. The advantage of a better router is it will use different frequency bands to avoid interference from other electronics and possibly more channels to avoid some device hogging bandwidth. Only one device can own the channel at one time, and if your router multiplexes everything on one channel in one frequency band (likely with a Sky hub) and there is an app on a phone somewhere that’s grabbing its undue share of timeslices that could also explain what you’re seeing.
Given that your laptop doesn’t display the problem does point to the PC as the cause, but it might be solved by using a different frequency band. It’s worth a try if you can get ahold of a different router.
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Literally anything made by Netgear or Asus is probably great. I have moved into Ubiquiti hardware, but that is not for your “average user”.
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