Question Random game disconnects/stream pauses despite no connectivity issues on wired ethernet connection ?

[silver085]

Hello.

This problem started to occur in the same day when technician had arrived with a new router after I upgraded my internet speed from 60 mb/s to 600 mb/s. Since the day when we plugged in new router, I have this weird disconnect like issues. Basically it looks like this :

If watching a live stream on Twitch, the stream alongside chat will pause like if I suddenly lost internet connection. If playing online games, I will simply disconnect with typical for internet connection issues messages such as "Connection timed out" or "Connection to the server lost". The weird thing is that my connection never really drops, as I can see the icon in Tray is fine. Also the moment which in stream pauses, I can just hit play/pause button immediately or just refresh the page and it will start playing just fine. It's like my connection drops for a less than second if that's possible or something, because as I said, I can see the icon in Tray that shows that I am constantly connected. Because of that, this problem isn't even noticeable when just browsing sites. Only when a "constant" connection is needed - like for watching a live stream or playing online games. This usually happens 3-4 times per day(10 hours sessions) sometimes less, sometimes more, it's really random.

At first, I thought those were some random problems with Twitch site, and a separate issue with a game. I contacted game's support, but they mostly told me about basics like adding game to a firewall exception, /flushdns command, restarting router and hard reset. A while ago, I had a game minimized running in the background(MMO), while I was watching a live stream on Twitch. The moment when stream and chat paused, I immediately checked the game. In that same moment, my ping spiked to a maxiumum of +999 and I got disconnected after a few seconds. This was the first time when I witnessed that this stream pauses and game disconnects are happening at the same time, so it was confirmed that this is an issue with my internet connection, rather than separate random issues.

Given it started after upgrading my internet and changing router to a new one, I contacted my ISP about it, but it's been a month since then, and we haven't managed to fix it. I had 2 technician visit, router was switched to a new one(same model), and all cables were checked in my home and everything is fine. We just can't find the cause of this. Im starting to think that maybe it is a problem with my PC, however I never really meddled with any internet related settings on my PC, like ever. There was never a need for it. I had my old router and 60 mb/s internet for a really long time, I think 6-7 years and didn't have any issues. I didn't change any internet settings on my PC shortly prior to getting a new router and internet speed.

Some day I read about pinging both your router's ip adress and the adress of the game's server which you have issues with, in order to find out where's the issue. I did both cmd -t and logged both to a separate txt files. Once in game disconnect occured, I let both pings to run for a few more seconds and closed them. I checked both text files from top to bottom and there was not a single line of request timed out/packet loss, so I really don't know.

Looking at this again, it makes a bit of sense as to why my ISP can't find anything. Because it doesn't look like I am actually losing connection at any point. There are no packet losses and the icon in Tray never changes either. It's just that online activities such as watching a live stream or playing games, several times a day are behaving l like I lost connection.

Router : TECHNICOLOR CGA4236TCH1
Motherboard: MSI H97 PC MATE

 

[bill001g]

You have done the key thing that I recommend. If you see no loss when running a ping in the background then it tends to be a software issue.

Twitch is just a fancy web page and can tolerate packet loss and delay much better than a game. A game the internet dropping data for even a fraction of a second will cause issues.

Although in this case I suspect it will not help because I think twitch and most games use IPv4. Try to disable IPv6 in the network settings. IPv6 takes a different path though the internet and can have issues when IPv4 works.

Your problem is very strange. Be very sure that you do not see ping issues. I am somewhat surprised the game server responds to ping most are configured to not because of all the bad people that would send lots of ping commands to crash the server.
The more common IP I recommend is 8.8.8.8 since it is a google DNS server IP that seems to always have great performance.

Check that there is no so called "gaming" QoS software on your machine. This though tends to cause slow data transfers more than packet loss. If you find it you might as well uninstall it since it provide no real benefit to most people.

 

[silver085]

You have done the key thing that I recommend. If you see no loss when running a ping in the background then it tends to be a software issue.

Twitch is just a fancy web page and can tolerate packet loss and delay much better than a game. A game the internet dropping data for even a fraction of a second will cause issues.

Although in this case I suspect it will not help because I think twitch and most games use IPv4. Try to disable IPv6 in the network settings. IPv6 takes a different path though the internet and can have issues when IPv4 works.

Your problem is very strange. Be very sure that you do not see ping issues. I am somewhat surprised the game server responds to ping most are configured to not because of all the bad people that would send lots of ping commands to crash the server.
The more common IP I recommend is 8.8.8.8 since it is a google DNS server IP that seems to always have great performance.

Check that there is no so called "gaming" QoS software on your machine. This though tends to cause slow data transfers more than packet loss. If you find it you might as well uninstall it since it provide no real benefit to most people.

About ping tests, game is Elder Scrolls Online(EU server), I was using IP adress from official page https://help.elderscrollsonline.com...-tracert-to-the-servers-to-test-my-connection

I used to ping 159.100.230.1, but I also read today about using cmd command

netstat -n -p tcp -b | more

or using Resource Monitor->Network tab->Tick game process and everything is showing a different addresses.

https://imgur.com/NujgTtD

The 2 from Resource Monitor are pingable, the one from CMD doesn't respond (request timed out). If we could find the correct one, I would start pinging both server and 8.8.8.8 today till disconnect happens and upload logs here.

I don't have any "game booster" type of software installed, neither are there any unintended processes running in the background that would be unfamiliar to me.

IPv6 was disabled by me a while ago and it didn't help. I turned it back on recently, but I will disable it again for the time being.

 

[bill001g]

Key is always to find one that does not work and then try to figure out what is different from the ones that do.
Problem is some are different purely because the owner of the router/server have configured it to not always respond to ping or delay the response to protect the device from denial of service attacks.

In a way none of this really matters. If there is some issue in the connection between ISP you can't really fix this. Maybe VPN would help. The place you really want to see the problem is to your router...then you can do something to fix it..or maybe in the second hop which would be the connection between your house and the ISP.

Key with ping is to find something that show a problem when the game does.

Maybe the event monitor will show something or maybe the resource monitor might show something. If you would get some kind of memory or cpu bottleneck maybe it would look like packet loss.

This problem is very strange

 

[silver085]

Key is always to find one that does not work and then try to figure out what is different from the ones that do.
Problem is some are different purely because the owner of the router/server have configured it to not always respond to ping or delay the response to protect the device from denial of service attacks.

In a way none of this really matters. If there is some issue in the connection between ISP you can't really fix this. Maybe VPN would help. The place you really want to see the problem is to your router...then you can do something to fix it..or maybe in the second hop which would be the connection between your house and the ISP.

Key with ping is to find something that show a problem when the game does.

Maybe the event monitor will show something or maybe the resource monitor might show something. If you would get some kind of memory or cpu bottleneck maybe it would look like packet loss.

This problem is very strange

I ran a total of 5 pings today, both IP's from the official site and both from the network resource manager and 8.8.8.8 aswell

Think I started around 5 p.m. and first disconnect occured at 11:20 p.m. I let them run for ~20 more seconds after I disconnected and closed them all :
https://pastebin.com/DcJHW39q
https://pastebin.com/exanG1Ru
https://pastebin.com/vb4aRtkx
https://pastebin.com/GunDxeRm
https://pastebin.com/4cfuYYnW

There's literally only 1 request timed out line in 4th log, but it's in the middle of the log, so it can't be related. Regarding event viewer, the only ones that are related to connection are :

Schannel 36887 fatal alert 40 & 70

But from what I read a while ago, these are harmless. They aren't occurring at the time of disconnect either. What's even more strange that this problem never occurs one by one in a short period of time. I mean, once it happened I know I am "safe" for another 3-4 hours before it can happen again.

 

[bill001g]

The latency on your ping tests are extremely consistent, this is what most people would really like to see when they play online games.

If it only happens every couple hours you start to thing about session timeouts. I assume you mean it is constantly connected to say twitch or your game for that long. If the router had a bug maybe it times out the session after a certain time. Ping commands are different sessions for each packet. Then again they replaced the router and only the ISP can update the firmware of a modem/router combo unit.

Maybe check the log in the router, most routers have some kind of log. It is not going to be the most common things like you getting error or the internet actually going down since that would kill your ping also.

This one has me stumped. If it was me I would use wireshark to capture the actual data and try to see which end terminated the session or if it thought there was data loss only in that session. This is not something trivial to do. Wireshark is pretty easy to get to run but understanding how tcp sessions are created and how data is transmitted over them is a fairly advanced thing. You might get lucky and wireshark will figure it out and put out red messages. You are going to have massive amounts of capture data if it only happens every couple hours. You can try it maybe you get lucky.

The key thing you would be looking for is which end sent the first "reset" or "fin" message. RST is a abnormal close of a session where fin is a clean normal one. You would want to try to get the exact time the game sees issues to make it easier to match the wireshark.
This though does not tell you why. All it tells you is if the remote side (ie the server) closed the session or your pc did. Things like data loss could cause either side to decide that the session is bad and terminate it would do the same thing if you force closed the app with say ctrl f4

This one is not simple unfortunately.

 

[silver085]

The latency on your ping tests are extremely consistent, this is what most people would really like to see when they play online games.

If it only happens every couple hours you start to thing about session timeouts. I assume you mean it is constantly connected to say twitch or your game for that long. If the router had a bug maybe it times out the session after a certain time. Ping commands are different sessions for each packet. Then again they replaced the router and only the ISP can update the firmware of a modem/router combo unit.

Maybe check the log in the router, most routers have some kind of log. It is not going to be the most common things like you getting error or the internet actually going down since that would kill your ping also.

This one has me stumped. If it was me I would use wireshark to capture the actual data and try to see which end terminated the session or if it thought there was data loss only in that session. This is not something trivial to do. Wireshark is pretty easy to get to run but understanding how tcp sessions are created and how data is transmitted over them is a fairly advanced thing. You might get lucky and wireshark will figure it out and put out red messages. You are going to have massive amounts of capture data if it only happens every couple hours. You can try it maybe you get lucky.

The key thing you would be looking for is which end sent the first "reset" or "fin" message. RST is a abnormal close of a session where fin is a clean normal one. You would want to try to get the exact time the game sees issues to make it easier to match the wireshark.
This though does not tell you why. All it tells you is if the remote side (ie the server) closed the session or your pc did. Things like data loss could cause either side to decide that the session is bad and terminate it would do the same thing if you force closed the app with say ctrl f4

This one is not simple unfortunately.

It does only happens every couple hours, but it's not exactly a session timeout I'd say. The possibility of this is basically in the background all the time, no matter what I am doing on my PC, or if it's even powered on. I remember there were times where I got disconnected after like 5 minutes after I logged in into game. Let's say I started my PC at 4 p.m and logged into game at 4:15 p.m. Then I got disconnected after like 5 minutes at 4:20 p.m. Simply because this issue decided to occur at 4:20 pm. If I was to start my PC/log into game after that, for example at 5 p.m, I would have missed it and the first disconnect for me to notice would be probably 8/9/10/11 p.m. I said in the beginning that the amount is random, sometimes 1-2 per day, sometimes 3-4, but it could be that in some days I simply get lucky with the timings. For example I start game shortly after it already occured and then I also quit before it was going to occur again and later in the day I play again for a few hours and quit before it happens again, so Im just not noticing it.

I have downloaded Wireshark today and will start capturing later today once I start playing again. I have started my PC at 4:30 p.m today and first disconnect already occured at 7:15 p.m. I know I just said that it happens in the background and I don't necessarily have to be playing or watching a live stream for it to occur, so theoretically I could just run it and leave it for few hours, but I don't really want to be guessing whenever it happened in the background during those few hours or if it didn't. It could still put out red messages, but those could be potentially unrelated, so I will start capturing once I start playing and then I'll pause it in a few seconds after disconnect occured to be sure. Just one question, I will check the log myself for any errors, but in case I wouldn't be able to find anything, could I send it to you in a private message? If yes, should I simpy use "Save as" or use one of the many "Export" options in Wireshark?

 

[bill001g]

I almost never read private messages, I don't think you can send files.
This is one of those things you start looking at it so you can kinda tell what is good and what is bad. Do stuff like kill the alt f4 the game just to see what you get. Your problem is even if I were to read it and say the server dropped the connection it does not say much. Even if you pc did it then you need to know what is in the game code that did it.
It is purely going to be luck to figure this out.

 

[silver085]

I almost never read private messages, I don't think you can send files.
This is one of those things you start looking at it so you can kinda tell what is good and what is bad. Do stuff like kill the alt f4 the game just to see what you get. Your problem is even if I were to read it and say the server dropped the connection it does not say much. Even if you pc did it then you need to know what is in the game code that did it.
It is purely going to be luck to figure this out.

Okay I managed to capture disconnect and I think I also found the corresponding lines in Wireshark. I did select both my local connection and "adapter for loopback traffic capture" while clicking capture.

159.100.232.179
I can confirm that was IP adress of the game's server, as this adress through the log was the most often used in conjunction with my own IP( Source/Destinantion I mean).

So the first "fin" is game's IP as Source and my IP as Destinantion
RST is then my IP as Source and game's IP as Destination
2nd "fin" is my IP as Source and some other IP as Destination(it's still related to the game as only last 3 numbers are different).

This is how it looks like when I closed game's process with task manager :

Just RST lines with my IP as Source.


Can we do something more based on this?

 

[bill001g]

That means the server closed the session. Not sure why your machine responded with a RST it should have responded with a FIN/ACK. Be sure the port numbers are the same games many times have multiple session open.

This one is kinda the worst case because the server decided there was something wrong with the session and closed it. Only the server code really knows why. Problem is from a network level it is a clean session close. It would look the same if you were to log off or say a admin forced you off. It is more likely there was some issue with the data transmission that the server decided to close the session.

 

[silver085]

I did a second capture, because short story long first one was a bit chaotic. 2nd is shorter, more clean and more condensed once disconnect occured. I only selected local connection for capture this time as well. After checking first one again more thoroughly, I had to do 1 more in order to confirm something and now that I compared it with 2nd I see it's true. It is my router that is closing the connection first.

I will describe these logs first.

In both logs, first there 2 blue lines(DNS)
First one is my IP Adress as Source and my Primary DNS Server as Destination, info : Standard query 0x124b A live-eu-services.elderscrollsonline.com
Second is my Primary DNS Server as Source and my IP Adress as Destination, info : Standard query response 0xb217 A live-eu-services.elderscrollsonline.com A 159.100.230.9

This 159.100.230.9 Adress is also part of the next 2 lines.

Next 2 lines are grey SYN and SYN,ACK lines

First one is my IP Adress as Source and 159.100.230.9 as Destination, info: 50581 → 443 [SYN] Seq=0 Win=8192 Len=0 MSS=1460 WS=256 SACK_PERM
Second is 159.100.230.9 as Source and my IP Adress as Destination, info: 443 → 50581 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=4380 Len=0 MSS=1396 SACK_PERM

After that there's a slight difference between 2 logs:

In 2nd log, next 2 lines are red font in black background TCP
Both are 159.100.230.9 as Source and my IP Adress as Destination, info: [TCP Dup ACK 73023#1] 443 → 50581 [ACK] Seq=3307 Ack=644 Win=4831 Len=0
2nd line is same only difference is in the info: [TCP Dup ACK 73023#2] 443 → 50581 [ACK] Seq=3307 Ack=644 Win=4831 Len=0

After that, next 2 lines are [FIN, ACK]
First one with my IP Adress as Source and 159.100.230.9 as Destination
Second is same just inverted Source and Destination

The difference in the 1st log is just that there's only one red font in black background TCP and it is between both [FIN, ACK] lines.

After that, it gets a bit complicated, there's RST in both logs but after it, there's few more SYN,ACK,FIN, TCP Retransmission, TCP Dup ACK.

So here's the thing, could I please send you both logs, email them to you, or maybe over Discord? I would just like the confirmation that it is in fact my router that's causing the problem and I would contact my ISP again with this discovery, ask them if they could give me a completely new model for few days for testing. You could also maybe find something else that's important in the logs which would be worth telling my ISP about.

 

[silver085]

That means the server closed the session. Not sure why your machine responded with a RST it should have responded with a FIN/ACK. Be sure the port numbers are the same games many times have multiple session open.

This one is kinda the worst case because the server decided there was something wrong with the session and closed it. Only the server code really knows why. Problem is from a network level it is a clean session close. It would look the same if you were to log off or say a admin forced you off. It is more likely there was some issue with the data transmission that the server decided to close the session.

Okay I have uploaded both to www.cloudshark.org, so you can view them without having to download them, can I send you the links in private message?

 

[bill001g]

I don't know how much good it does. It is not going to tell us exactly what is wrong. Just give us a clue where to look.

It is not likely the server since you say it affect multiple application. This would leave some internet outage that ping does not detect that might be in some other ISP network.

The only way I can see confirm this is to try another device. Maybe use your phone on wifi to watch twitch. If it also has issues then it is not likely your pc.

But if it is either of these you are stuck since this is all outside your control so it really doesn't pay to chase it since you can't get it fixed. Maybe a vpn could fix this kind of stuff but it is all hit and miss to try.

This leaves some kind of software issue with your pc. Again it is not likely some simple network issue because ping should show the problem. Wireshark would not see delays or packet loss inside the pc between the network drivers and the application...assuming it is real loss. It tends to very clearly show real packet loss. You say event viewer sees no issues so it is not something crashing. This leave some unknown program block your network traffic at random times. Not sure how you find something like that.

 

[silver085]

I don't know how much good it does. It is not going to tell us exactly what is wrong. Just give us a clue where to look.

It is not likely the server since you say it affect multiple application. This would leave some internet outage that ping does not detect that might be in some other ISP network.

The only way I can see confirm this is to try another device. Maybe use your phone on wifi to watch twitch. If it also has issues then it is not likely your pc.

But if it is either of these you are stuck since this is all outside your control so it really doesn't pay to chase it since you can't get it fixed. Maybe a vpn could fix this kind of stuff but it is all hit and miss to try.

This leaves some kind of software issue with your pc. Again it is not likely some simple network issue because ping should show the problem. Wireshark would not see delays or packet loss inside the pc between the network drivers and the application...assuming it is real loss. It tends to very clearly show real packet loss. You say event viewer sees no issues so it is not something crashing. This leave some unknown program block your network traffic at random times. Not sure how you find something like that.

Alright I sent in to you, I'll contact my ISP in Monday with everything I have learned here from you, so thank you very much for your help. If you find anything in the log in the meanwhile, please let me know.

 

[silver085]

I don't know how much good it does. It is not going to tell us exactly what is wrong. Just give us a clue where to look.

It is not likely the server since you say it affect multiple application. This would leave some internet outage that ping does not detect that might be in some other ISP network.

The only way I can see confirm this is to try another device. Maybe use your phone on wifi to watch twitch. If it also has issues then it is not likely your pc.

But if it is either of these you are stuck since this is all outside your control so it really doesn't pay to chase it since you can't get it fixed. Maybe a vpn could fix this kind of stuff but it is all hit and miss to try.

This leaves some kind of software issue with your pc. Again it is not likely some simple network issue because ping should show the problem. Wireshark would not see delays or packet loss inside the pc between the network drivers and the application...assuming it is real loss. It tends to very clearly show real packet loss. You say event viewer sees no issues so it is not something crashing. This leave some unknown program block your network traffic at random times. Not sure how you find something like that.

Okay so I just confirmed 2 important things. It does happen across all wi-fi connected devices. There's a laptop in a second room, but it's not being used by me, so I couldn't be sure, but I was told there were no issues. However I checked it myself today.

Second important thing confirmed - it seems to happen exactly every 4 hours. I noticed it few days ago that it does happen in similiar hours. For the past 3 days I've been watching it more closely, and making sure I am logged into game at those specific hours to confirm it.

So basically it goes like this : 9:17 p.m -> 11:17 p.m -> 3:17 a.m. Can't tell further as I usually go to sleep around 5 a.m, so I'm missing it at 7:17 a.m and also I usually don't start my PC atleast till 4 p.m, so I'm missing the one at 3:17 p.m too. Though as I said earlier, I remember there were few times where I got disconnected after like 5-10 minutes after logging in. Those were probably the days were I logged in at 3 pm, so I experienced it at 3:17 p.m. It also makes sense now how I remembered that I could usually play for a few hours, because when I start at 4 or 5 p.m, I have 2-3 hours before it happens at 9:17 p.m and then full 4 hours till 11:17 p.m

Regarding other devices, today at 11:10 p.m I logged into game, alt tabbed and went to Twitch and on my phone I opened the same stream in Twitch android app. 11:17 p.m -> both streams on my PC and phone had froze and in game ping was a maximum of 999 and disconnect shortly after.

For 3:17 a.m I also opened same stream on the laptop and same thing happened. Stream froze on my phone and laptop and I ran to my room to check PC and and it was also frozen and in game 999 ping.

So does this fully confirm it's an issue with my router and not my PC? I can safely call my ISP and tell them that I am sure it's on their side?

 

[bill001g]

What is so strange is you do not see issues with the ping command.

At least you now know for sure it is not the end device or the application software.

The problem you have is the ISP is going to do similar test that you have done with the ping command and conclude there is no issue.

This is a large thread,have you replaced the router. A strange bug in the router could drop long open session but not affect new ones. A ping command would open a new session. Normally you would try a firmware upgrade first but the ISP is responsible for firmware upgrades on modem/router combo unit.

This is where having a separate modem and router would help. You could plug your pc directly into the modem to remove the router from the path. You might be able to put your current router into bridge mode which would disable the router.

If this is a ISP owned device maybe see if they will give you a different one.