Disconnected from WoW

[bobbank]

Hello. My Warcraft guild is attempting to switch to Mumble from Vent, but so far we are experience two fatal issues. I will make a separate post for each.

One user is experience disconnects from WoW. She has never experienced these before using Mumble, and the moment see reverted to Ventrilo, the disconnects ceased.

Could you please provide some remedies or diagnostic steps to follow? We cannot proceed if she is randomly disconnected in this fashion.

[bobbank]

We have tried disabling QoS and also tried TCP mode. Neither of these helps.

Once she connects to Mumble, the WoW client will boot her to the login screen within a few minutes. This happens even if she is in a room alone with zero voice chat. By contrast she has raided in WoW with Vent for months and never had this problem.

[commandchannel]

Has she tried disabling the overlay? What OS is she using?

Just to be clear, she's being disconnected from WoW but remains connected to the Mumble server?

[bobbank]

Thank you for the responses.

We have the overlay and positional audio off. We also turned off QoS, and engaged TCP mode. She is using Windows 7. A new piece of information I learned last night was that her latency in WoW shot way up right before the disconnect, and was still high (briefly) when she logged back in.

You are correct that she is booted to the WoW login screen (so, not an application crash, just a disconnect) but not disconnected from Mumble. It happens most readily when she is raiding, and I know that is a time when a throttled internet connection of any sort can prompt WoW to boot you. But I verified that her quality settings are at the default values, so I don't see why Mumble would be hogging all her bandwidth, and she has a broadband connection.

Is there a tool that would let us observe what's actually happening to her internet connection when this occurs?

[commandchannel]

Interesting... You might try having her disable network throttling (instructions).

AFAIK Windows 7 comes with Performance Monitor, you can use that to get detailed information on her network interface (connections, retransmits, failures, throughput, resets, etc). It's not the easiest thing in the world to configure, she'll have to add the counters and possibly configure the scales, but it's free and fairly fine-grained. Click on Start -> Run, then enter performon and hit enter to launch it.

[bobbank]

Okay we're going to try that.

Do you think some setting on her router could cause this sort of reaction? It just seems very strange that, if she had underlying connection issues, why did they never show up with Vent. Currently she and her team are back to raiding in Vent and she once again experiences a stable connection with no disconnects...

[bobbank]

These steps did not help. But we did observe something strange last night.

When she launched the Mumble application, it immediately caused her latency in WoW to go red - even tho she hadn't even connected to our voice server yet! As soon as she exited Mumble, the latency went back to its normal <100 ms. Do you have any ideas what on her system could possibly cause this sort of reaction? It's like her bandwidth is being pre-emptively allocated exclusively to Mumble, even before there is a server connection.

Some strange configuration with her Router?

[commandchannel]

Sometimes there are issues with routers and QoS, but since you have already disabled QoS I am inclined to think that it's not the router. Does she have another computer that she can use? This would help isolate the router as the cause.

Just some general things she can try:

• Restart the router
  
• Check the router configuration to see if there is any unnecessary port forwarding going on
  
• Check the drivers of her NIC to make sure they're up to date
  
• Check the priority of mumble.exe through the Windows Task Manager. If it is set to High, try dropping it down to Above Normal or Normal

[bobbank]

We found that Mumble sets itself to HIGH priority by default. I was just curious - why does it do this?

Admittedly, that hasn't caused problems for any of the rest of us. But in the past I found that setting Vent to high priority could cause issues.

We tried changing priority to Normal and so far, so good, but the real test will not come until tonight. Thanks for your continued suggestions.

[bobbank]

We changed the priority to medium. She is now able to run WoW without being disconnected. However, she experienced latency spikes.

I monitored her connection to the mumble server, and it was flawless. ~60ms ping with +/- 10ms variance, and 0 packet loss. So her internet connection is fine, as far as mumble knows. But WoW.exe thinks otherwise. The problem improved when we lowered the priority. (This is brand new computer btw.)

Does this indicate the router as the most likely culprit? Somehow it is choking WoW in response to something Mumble does, but Vent doesn't.