Cut Your Latency in HALF

[benternet]

I have a few friends in my guild who live in Aussie land and always are complaining and fighting with the latency gods. They are always trying new things like Smoothping.com and other services, but recently found Leatrix's Latency Fix and spoke very highly of it. They reported going from 300 or so ping down to ~120.


Living stateside lag has never been a major problem, but recently i have been having some disconnect issues in HToC and averaging anywhere from 200-250ms. So I decided to give it a shot and was really impressed with the results. My disconnects went down and my ping is down to 75-100ms.


This addon/script implements the TCPAck fix. I saw another post with a guide to go into you registry and do it manually, but saw some complaints about it being alot of work. I also read that this was something that had been patched in 2.3.2, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Here is a quote from the developer's FAQ.

Didn't Blizzard disable this already?
This is a common misconception but the answer is no. What Blizzard did was disable nagling, way back in patch 2.3.2.

Nagling bundles small packets together into larger ones for more efficient transmission. The effects are similar - bundling packets together always produces higher latency which is why it's bad for online games. Blizzard disabled nagling because of this, however, the acknowledgement queueing system used by the TCP protocol remains.

For the technically minded, Blizzard made the TCPNoDelay function redundant, as Wow now includes it by default. They didn't change TcpAckFrequency. Leatrix Latency Fix changes that.

I was a bit sketched out about executing .VBS scripts, but everything is "open source" and you can open the files in a text editor to see for yourself. Also the developer links to endorsements from Tankspot.com( PVP How To: Improve Your Arena Ratings - TankSpot) and others. Also included is an "undo" script.


Also note this improves your latency in all other online games you play, and works on Windows XP(SP2 and later), VISTA(SP1 and later), and Win7. This unfortunately does not work for Macs, but on the addon's page he gives a simple command to run at mac prompt to make the same change. Below is the Mac equivalent

Is there a Macintosh version?
Leatrix Latency Fix isn't supported on Macs. However, you can achieve lower latency in OSX by entering the following command in a terminal window. This will disable delayed acknowledgements until you restart your computer.

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

To disable them permanently, create a text file under "/etc/" called "sysctl.conf" and copy/paste the following line then restart your computer.

net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

To set things back to default, just delete the "sysctl.conf" file and restart your computer.

Leatrix Latency Fix : WoWInterface Downloads : WoW Tools & Utilities

After being a longtime lurker, I hope this can help a few people out.

[Cirenia]

I've tried this one and it really works. Nice post.

[Taylor123123]

Hmm, sounds great im gonna get it now (:

[agni]

Just use this easy guide.. nothing more nothing less, got my latency from 200 to 60

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbWQnvytvqk]YouTube - TcpAckFrequency tutorial[/ame]

[~Jagris]

I use to always have 75 MS but when I updated to W7 64 bit it went up to about 200, now I am down to 60MS in Dal. Thanks, also logging in is quicker +Rep x3

[Yaphilley]

Working, went from 500 MSish to about 200.

Thanks for this Benternet! +3x Rep

PS: You might wanna put Vista Anti-Lag here, it fixes any lag spikes caused by Vista.

[Crysto]

No Improvement

Vista 32 bit

350 normal, 150-160 with lowerping.

[Smygelito]

Thanks a bunch, 60ms in dalaran

[PinkiPan]

didnt do anything for me

[asvo007]

Worked for me, from 150 to 50 ms!

[Deathyaw]

OMG Ze best guide ever ! From "200-225" to 96-109!!!!!!!!!!!!

+rep for u all day long

[Cancerpuffs]

+rep, mine went from 240-300 to 120-140. I've done this the manual way a lot since I switch comps a lot, this is so much easier since I can just put on usb instead of having to manually do it over and over and over.

[Century]

has anyone tried smoothping.com

[fluxor]

Great guide, my latency dropped!

[Xbert]

+rep mate!

I went from 150-200 to 40-75

Thanks alot =)