Problems with Chat Lag
 

So, anyone who spends time in our chat channel knows I've been having some issues lately! :p

I use XChat 2.0.10c and in the past have never had any problems. This year I moved into an apartment complex where the internet is including with rent (yay!) but it means the connection is shared and controlled by routers on their end. The first few weeks of school I didn't notice any trouble, but starting about a week ago suddenly I was having trouble with chat. It fluctuates, sometimes it is perfectly fine and others I am lagging anywhere from two to ten minutes behind conversation on my end, even though I appear to be in real time to everyone else. I should mention that at first it seemed to only occue between the hours of 10:00pm and 3:00am, but now it is constant throughout the day.

So, any ideas as to what could be causing this? Is it the apartment servers, and if so is there anything I can do? Could it be something else unrealited that has to do with my system and how could I fix that? Am I able to change the port I connect with and could that solve it?

Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks as always! :)

Lag is not likely to be caused on your end. It just means that the connection is too slow or not stable enough to keep up with what's being transmitted. There's myriad things that can cause this. It could be your complex, but without a good look at the topology and traffic statistics it'd be hard to say definitively. It could also be some funny routing, try running a tracert and see what comes up. I know I once had a friend who's connection would change from routing through Ottawa to routing through Houston between 6 and 7 every night and since they had a VPN going it was very noticable how the lag changed. Unfortunately if that's the case it's way out on tha intarweb and there's really not a whole hell of a lot you can do about it.

You can't change ports because the server is set up to connect to a specific one and if you switched it wouldn't let you. I don't know what IRC network the TFP chat uses (I've logged on twice through the Java applet) but you may be able to use a different server in the network and see if that helps any.

Also, keep an eye on your network for the next little bit. The goal is to figure out the extent of the lag. Is it just IRC that's affected, or is it all internet applications and are there specific times of day? You may consider asking the administrator for your complex's network too and find out what sort of traffic shaping he has implemented to keep one or two tenants from eating up all the bandwidth. The problem might just be someone turning on bittorrent before they go to bed each night and stealing your pipe.

Our network at work (ironically at a tech support office) has similar issues that stem entirely from bad topology. The whole thing runs off a 1 GB trunk with 1 server and 1 gateway and a whole bunch of switches. As soon as it gets busy people start accessing the server more and entire subnets go to lunch. Not pretty. Your complex could be experiencing some sort of similar issues.

someone elseis prolly usin kazaa and its sucking up all your bandwidth

Google and the IRC server both time out on tracert. Anyone have any ideas?

They time out? That's gonna be a clogged pipe. As to what's causing it, I'd guess that someone's got file sharing going and eating up all the bandwidth.

I'm not sure that file sharing is the issue, because they block those ports specifially, kazaa doesn't work at all and and BitTorrent client goes so slowly it bascially doesn't work either. It's hard to say I suppose, thanks for trying!