Fixing Mabinogi Lag (The Right Way)
Does it take too long for your skills to load?
Do you sometimes get frozen for a few seconds?
Do you freeze, then randomly die 5 seconds later?
Is your lag so bad that other guides/tweaks don't fix it?
This guide is for you!
Does it take too long for your skills to load?
Do you sometimes get frozen for a few seconds?
Do you freeze, then randomly die 5 seconds later?
Is your lag so bad that other guides/tweaks don't fix it?
This guide is for you!
- Intro
- Other Devices
- Downloads / Updates
- LAN Connection
- Nagle / MTU / Technical Tweaks
- If All Else Fails...
1. Intro
This guide is aimed at helping you fix your lag the right way. What is "the right way"? As with anything, the first step to solving a problem is to identify the cause. With that in mind, this guide will be going in order from the most common issues that cause the most problems at the top, to the final technical tweaks that are likely for more serious players at the bottom. Importantly, if you are experiencing latency issues in Mabinogi do not skip any section, as one of the simplest solutions could be the one that fits your situation!
2. Other Devices
This is something that most people overlook. Just because your home might have a 10 megabit connection to it (for example) doesn't mean that your computer has 10 megabits of downstream bandwidth. It's 10 megabits to the router, and everything in your home has to share that pipeline. Every computer, every tablet, even smartphones will often make use of the local wifi.
In addition it's not just the downstream, when it comes to gaming your upload speed is very important as well (since that's how you send commands to the game server), but unfortunately for 99% of cases a home user's upload speed is only a fraction of their download speed. Because of this, it's very easy for one computer in a house to choke the internet for everybody else.
To Test: Shut down/off every other computer, tablet, cell phone, and stray cat with wifi ability in the house, then relog into Mabinogi. If things are suddenly working just fine, then you know that one of the other devices is causing your issue.
To Fix: Ask them to turn it down a notch (slow down the number of things they download at once, NOT run multiple MMOs of their own at the same time, NOT stream 17 youtube videos at once, etc.) If whoever it is is doing something important or refusing to cooperate, try changing your play-time hours for Mabinogi to some time when they're not killing everybody else's connection downloading 3TB of giraffe porn or whatever.
If they're willing to cooperate but you don't really know what's up with their machine, the next section should be helpful too.
3. Downloads / Updates
As I mentioned in section 2, the internet connection is shared. If you have 10 megabits down, then means 10 megabits total at any given moment. If one program on your computer is downloading a file at 7 megabits per second... whoops, now Mabinogi only has access to less than a third of your connection's downstream!
On a more technical note, it's not just the pure bandwidth being used. There's also overhead for individual connections, so things that maintain a lot of connections at once (P2P software and especially torrents!) can choke out your router without even using half of your download/upload.
To Test: Close any and all download-enabled programs. Close Steam, close any and all torrent programs, anything that could allow you to download/upload music through it (iTunes), anything like that. Make sure they're actually closed and not just minimized to the bottom-right! Do that then relog into Mabi. If everything works, then you know it was some program's automatic uploads/downloads running at the same time that were the issue.
To Fix: The exact specifics depend on the program, but generally for automatic downloads (Windows Update, Steam, etc.) you can tell them to not download the update automatically or go into an offline mode.
For things that simply won't function right without doing what they do (torrent clients, P2P programs like Shareaza/Ares/Frostwire/whatever) you can usually go into their settings and limit the bandwidth they can use as well as lowering the number of connections they'll make at once (I suggest half to a fourth of whatever the default is). Change whatever settings are needed so that when the programs do need to download data, they do so at a slowed pace, not hogging all the internet (so to speak).
4. LAN Connection
If other devices in your house are working fine but your connection to Mabinogi is bad, then your computer's connection to your home network might just be bad. Don't take the fact that web browsing works to be a sign of no problem! Web browsing (and many activities people do online nowadays) either use TCP (which re-sends lost packets) or UDP with their own resend mechanism. As this section is rather broad, I'll simply list some things to try.
1 - Remove any proxy settings that may be set on the computer you're using to play Mabinogi on (unless it's 100% required to play Mabinogi). Proxies will always add more latency to your connection (by the sheer fact that they add at least one more hop to the route).
2- If you're using a wireless connection, try logging into the router and changing the wireless channel.
3 - If you're using a wireless connection and changing the channel did nothing, make sure you have some decent WiFi security (WPA or WPA2) enabled. If not (no security or WEP), your neighbors could be using your connection for their own downloads and such! The exact steps to do this depend on your router's make/model.
4 - If your settings on the modem/router are correct... it might just need a reboot. Unplug the power cables to both and leave them unplugged for a few minutes (this won't erase any settings), then plug them back in and wait for everything to re-establish itself.
5. Nagle / MTU / Technical Tweaks
If you're certain that your connection is working normally and you don't have any major latency issues but simply want to squeeze a bit more out of your reaction times in Mabinogi, then that is the time that you should follow guides like this which (assuming your connection is working as it should) can provide noticeable improvements to how Mabinogi runs.
6. If All Else Fails...
It may just be your internet! Use a site like speedtest.net to test your speed. These sites will also generally tell you how your connection rates with others in your country, like in the below example image.
[Image: http://www.speedtest.net/result/2868153441.png]
Generally one (1) megabit (Mbps) down and half (0.5) a megabit (Mbps) up is what you'll want to play a game like Mabinogi. If you don't even have that much (after doing the above fixes!), then there's a problem.
If your local network is running properly and you simply have bad internet speeds, then no amount of tweaks you can do on your machine can fix the problem since the problem is the limit on the amount of data you can send/get. Consider paying more for a higher tier of internet service from your ISP, or simply moving to a more populated area (as they usually have better internet access).