I saw a thread on the Steam Users' Forum about someone who was getting like, 12 kB/s download speed specifically in his Steam game client. Since he was at the end of his rope, I told him to try capturing with Wireshark and see if anything obvious pops out. He posted packet captures whilst trying to download and while not, and I couldn't find anything obvious. Is there a proper place to post packet captures for those who are skilled with networking to poke through and look for problems? asked 14 Nov '10, 19:27  hmmwhatsthisdo |
3 Answers:
If your friend is comfortable uploading his network data to the web, he can upload it to www.cloudshark.org, from which others can view the data...finding someone versed in the Steam client's protocol(s) is a different matter. (I am unaffiliated with CloudShark. No warranty express or implied. Void in Rhode Island. You get the idea.) answered 14 Nov '10, 19:32  wesmorgan1 edited 14 Nov '10, 19:34 |
The trace file uploaded shows numerous packets lost in the proces and an interesting "pace" to data sent to your friend's Steam client. It appears the Steam server sends data at a relatively constant 95ms rate with few deviations. In general, not a blazing spew of data... In Wireshark, select What can your friend do? Well... given that some router along the path to 66.77.49.4 may be dropping the packets, it may be difficult to locate. answered 14 Nov '10, 21:34  lchappell ♦ edited 14 Nov '10, 21:39 Should I have him do a tracert to the Valve content server IP and look for say, points where the hop time dramatically increases? (15 Nov '10, 16:30) hmmwhatsthisdo I had him do a tracert to the content server, results shown here. (15 Nov '10, 17:35) hmmwhatsthisdo |
Looking at the "download" capture I see:
I've no knowledge about (configuring for) Steam and don't know anything about your setup so I'll just say the following: It sure looks like something is going on that is pacing the connection (especially given that it seems that other downloads work AOK). To me it seems pretty unnatural that frames should be received almost always about every 95 millisecs. Is it a clue that the same effect is seen from 2 different destination IP's (using the same TCP port 27030) ? answered 14 Nov '10, 21:45  Bill Meier ♦♦ The port 27030 definitely means something - the Steam client almost always uses ports in the 270xx range. When I looked up the secondary destination IP (assuming you meant the 4.xx.xx.xx one), it appeared to be an ISP server. The person who's experiencing the problem has contacted their ISP, who told them that they don't interfere with connections, but the ISP support rep may have been misinformed. (15 Nov '10, 16:39) hmmwhatsthisdo |
He already uploaded the packet data, I'm just looking for somewhere to have people poke through it and see if they notice anything wrong. I didn't want to immediately post it here, because this site appears to be for, well, Wireshark. Posting a thread asking for people to look through something might have been taken the wrong way.
Where is online (the trace file)? There are a lot of folks here who can take a quick look.
Well, the thread is here, the packet capture with Steam running (In case you didn't know, Steam is a game client, sort of like iTunes for games) is here, and the packet capture w/o Steam running is here. From what I can tell, the actual traffic is between 192.168.1.101 and 66.77.49.4, the latter being a Valve content server AFAIK.