Blizzard Launcher - De-syncs DSL

Sin_Chase

Sin_Chase

Sin_Chase

Soldato
Joined
13 Jan 2004
Posts
21,247
Am pretty bloody miffed at this issue. Have never seen anything like it before.

Activated WoW: MoP 10 day trial for a laugh and am trying to download the 17GB of updated client files. Have never had issues in the past but am now.

The launcher starts, begins downloading and uses my line nicely, ~2MBytes/Second. After between 5 seconds > 10 minutes I lose all internet. My DSL line has actually de-synced and reconnected.

It's not a throughput issue as Origin, Steam and many other services max my line in the same fashion for hours on end without problem.

P2P on the launcher is disabled.

It's not routing performance/overheating issues as I run a pfSense appliance plugged into a DG834 in modem only mode. LAN <> PfSense <> DG834 Modem <> ISP. The pfSense appliance does not even see 10% utilisation on the hardware I am using.

It's utterly bizzare. The DG834 modem is not rebooting, it stays up. The LAN interface uptime and physical monitoring of the device confirms this. Quite simply the DSL de-syncs and re-syncs when using the Blizzard downloader. I have tweaked SnR margins to gain more dB and sacrifice speed to rule out stability issues but to no effect. I am at a loss what to try next...

DG834 is in absolute dumb modem only mode. No NAT, Firewall, UnPnP or otherwise. Absolutely nothing but DSL sync, auth, IP allocation and onwards to my pfSense router/firewall.

pfSense is entirely unaffected and does it's job as it should.

Some Googling reveals lots of people with the same problem and lots of different 'fixes' listed, some of which seem to work for some but not others.

Has anyone seen such behaviour with the Blizzard Launcher? It's NEVER happened before and seems to be linked to the latest launcher/download tools version. I can sort of understand P2P flood, UnPnP issues etc overloading a router/modem and forcing a full reboot but I do not get that...just loss of sync.

I would have never of guessed a simple software application could totally desync my ADSL line but....well - it seems to be happening here!
 
Is the downloader connection cycling at all (as it would with P2P)? I used a custom firmware (DG-team IIRC) on my DG834 IIRC to be able to up the max connections to work around issues like this. Tho this issue sounds a bit more bizarre than the usual connection flooding ones.
 
Not sure if it does connection cycling. Would need to get out inspection software and check, the connection sometimes dies so fast it's hard to tell though.

I am using DGTEAM firmware for modem mode on my DG834GT, what specific Max Connections options did you change? The 'Max conntrack number' option?

Even so, I would expect the connection to die...but not for the DSL to lose sync :/
 
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Probably won't solve the problem tho its a possibility - running out of connections can do all sorts of weird things.

Sounds a lot like the problem I used to have years ago with BT traffic management and Steam - during peak time any download on steam would cause the connection to stall out and eventually resync - I temporarily worked around it by running steam through a VPN until BT finally got their act together.
 
inspected the downloaders TCP/IP usage..

Holy mother of..............It opens 10s of connections per second non-stop...no wonder it KILLS my DSL connection at the modem level, must just nuke the available memory or untill the max connection threshold is reached.

Totally nuts....

blizz_downloader_connspam.JPG
 
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Good chance its nuking the memory - also connection cycling like that tends to result in lots of connections stalled in FIN_WAIT_2 state on the router (due to a bug in the underlying *nix kernel) which can take upto 10 minutes to clear and sometimes won't clear at all which chokes the max connections pretty quick.
 
Think it's worth enabling, Enable time-wait connection fast recycle?

It activates the tcp fast recycle of Time-Wait-2 state tcp connections.
Click to expand...

Your not wrong, my pfSense rotuer has muchos FIN_WAIT_2:FIN_WAIT_2 on account of the Blizz Downloader. Modem I am not able to run such diagnostics on, for now have upped maxconn from 2048 to 8192. If I still get issues I will try with fast recycle enabled.
 
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In yer wow launcher options mate disable the P2P side of things.

It's always seemed to favour uploading what you have to others rather than downloading what you need.
 
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