L4D / SRCDS Latency

[burns]

I'm just now getting into hosting a dedicated server and had a couple of questions surrounding ping / latency in game. I am hosting the L4D demo on a separate computer over 100mbps LAN and am connecting directly to the private IP address. I am receiving a ping of 75-85 on average while in game (status command) and others connecting via internet are averaging about 150. When I ping the computer directly from the same local computer the ICMP returns around 7-15ms latency on average. When users ping the server from the internet (I am forwarding ICMP to that machine as well), they are getting between 50-70, which I would consider normal.

What is causing this large increase in latency? I have tested this on multiple computers (1-dedicated server, 2-virtual server inside my host computer), and both have the same results. Both have MORE than enough resources. The VM alone is a gigabit connection internal to the host machine, which will not even go through the switch. The dedicated server will go through the switch but will bypass all router rules.

Is there a srcds setting or a L4D setting that I can change? I am running 300fps and 100 tick on the server. I am going to test running a TF2 server on it tonight as I am guessing L4D is designed to run smoother over substantially higher latency. Thoughts / ideas welcome.

[Drocona]

So within your own network you get a latency of 65-85? If so, there's something wrong with your switching/router whatever.

High pings don't have to do anything with the server software, it's either firewalls or connections that raise ping.

[burns]

Drocona Wrote:So within your own network you get a latency of 65-85? If so, there's something wrong with your switching/router whatever.

High pings don't have to do anything with the server software, it's either firewalls or connections that raise ping.

Please read the entire post. 7ms latency on ICMP traffic, it's not network. I'm running a 310n with DD-WRTv24sp1, no QoS, under zero load. Virtual network bridges route traffic directly between the host/guest operating systems, so in the case of my virtual server setup, there is no router/wire for the traffic to even cross. Still a 75ms ping.

Can someone post me their server.cfg and launch parameters and tell me what pings they are averaging?

Update: Ran a TF2 server with 10 people in it. I had a constant 5 ping on LAN and internet member pings ranged from 45 to 80. I'm guessing that L4D simply reports higher pings. Everyone I've talked to who have been on dedicated servers average pings from 100+

[Drocona]

I still think it's weird, I run any dedicated server out of the box without server.cfg or whatever with a ping below 10ms on my own network.
I haven't tried L4D yet.

[pissedoffmonkey]

I have noticed this as well. PING.EXE reports 50-60ms to my favorite server's IP, but in-game (L4D) it shows as 130-150ms. When I host a dedicated L4D LAN server the clients ping my IP at <10ms but in-game are generally >70ms. When hosting other games (some source-based, some not) this doesn't happen.

What is causing this overhead and (more importantly) what can be done to reduce it?

My dedicated server specs:
Intel C2D e8400 (45nm 6MB cache 3GHz) @ 4GHz
2GB DDR2-800
(2)250GB HDD RAID-0
8800GTS 512
100Mb LAN

Specs of internet server I frequent:
Intel C2D e4400 @ 3.2GHz
4GB DDR2-800
(2)WD 150GB Raptor HDD RAID-0
100Mb colocated

UPDATE:
After looking into things further, it seems the console commands ping and status are reporting an inaccurate value for latency. While pinging mid 50s to a dedicated server, net_graph 3 reported low 70s. Both ping and status were reporting low 130s. In this case (at least) the difference was about 60ms.

Also, why can't the TAB screen in-game show latency in ms like everything else? What is 2 orange bars exactly?