Lovefilm kills my Ping!

[Daston]

Hey guys,

Not sure what can be done with this. My wife watches stuff on Lovefilm & Netflix (she us giving the month free trial a bash on Lovefilm) on the PS3. Now Netflix is fine but as soon as she turns on Lovefilm my ping will shoot up massively when playing BF3 etc.

Is there anyway to cap the amount of bandwidth Lovefilm uses?

[Tycho]

You can get routers with quality of service settings which will allow you to prioritise the PS3 traffic which may help. There are a few people on here who use Dratek routers and speak highly of them although they seem to be a bit pricey.

[yajeed]

Daston said:

Hey guys,

Not sure what can be done with this. My wife watches stuff on Lovefilm & Netflix (she us giving the month free trial a bash on Lovefilm) on the PS3. Now Netflix is fine but as soon as she turns on Lovefilm my ping will shoot up massively when playing BF3 etc.

Is there anyway to cap the amount of bandwidth Lovefilm uses?

What he said; What's happening is that the other applications are using all of your available download bandwidth. As a result, you get queueing on the router. As in normal operation, your gaming traffic (and pings) will get added to the back of the queue so you'll see an increase in latency in those ping responses.

You need to adjust that somehow (so the queueing is less fair on her bulk traffic and more generous to your latency sensitive traffic. Any router that can do QoS will be able to do what you want.

[Daston]

Awesome will throttle the ps3 a bit. Maybe she will go back to netflix as that dosnt seem as bandwidth heavy.

[thetrash]

No st, streaming video slows down your connection shocker!

[yajeed]

thetrash said:

No st, streaming video slows down your connection shocker!

Thanks for that useful insight. It's far from a foregone conclusion that would be the case, however in this case the question was 'how do I avoid it' rather than 'look what I've discovered'.

[Daston]

thetrash said:

No st, streaming video slows down your connection shocker!

Wow thanks Sherlock if you had read my post you would have noticed the issue is only with lovefilm and not netflix....care to work that one out all knowing one?

what's really odd is I can run gaming2 pc's with bf3 a ps3 with netflix and another ps3 online and the pcs get a ping of 50ish. change netflix to lovefilm and both bf3 sessions go over 200

[Tycho]

Lovefilm isn't streaming HD and Netflix SD is it?

[yajeed]

Daston said:

Wow thanks Sherlock if you had read my post you would have noticed the issue is only with lovefilm and not netflix....care to work that one out all knowing one?

what's really odd is I can run gaming2 pc's with bf3 a ps3 with netflix and another ps3 online and the pcs get a ping of 50ish. change netflix to lovefilm and both bf3 sessions go over 200

The answer is because LoveFilm downloads at a higher rate than the other applications. That could be for a number of reasons, but none you can easily control without QoS.

To look at it simply, imagine a drainpipe with a big funnel on top. You're stood above it with two buckets of water. The latency you're seeing from ping is effectively how long it takes for a drop of water to traverse the pipe and hit the ground.

If you pour both slowly one doesn't affect the other. However, if you pour one really quickly, the pipe soon fills with water and backs up into the funnel at the top. At that point, the drops take longer to get from top to bottom, i.e. your ping time increases.

You need QoS to limit the speed at which LoveFilm downloads data so that you don't overwhelm the capacity of your Internet circuit.

I've never used LoveFilm, but I assume it's going to download as quickly as possible, so it's not doing what some streams do which is just download at the rate at which you're consuming the content.

Edited by yajeed on Tuesday 13th November 11:25