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Theory on Server Issues/Ping Spikes


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Intelligence Officer

Intelligence Officer

  • [C] UNIT LEADER
  • ACCESS [4] TOP SECRET〔CW〕
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So I have a theory on what has been causing the server issues with Infinite. It may be completely incorrect or inaccurate so you are welcome to scrutinise or theorise with me.

Basically, like others I have noticed that on frequent occasion that many games have vastly fluctuating ping and that packet loss issues can occur randomly without warning in games. Sometimes ping spikes to 3/4 digits and you can get Unstable packet loss out of the blue. Most seem to be attributing this to netcode or issues within the engine itself, which I don’t believe is the case as it has only been occurring to this level (ignoring the shot around walls complaints prior to this, that’s lag compensation) since around Early July.

Basically I know that Infinite runs on Azure servers, these are scattered throughout the world with the majority located in US. Up until July things had been fairly stable with only occasional issues. However during early July, approx the same time the issues starting occuring, Azure dropped an worldwide update (Previously had only applied to US) to the servers with a “Gateway load balancing feature”. From what I can gather this basically monitors network traffic across your client servers and redistributes that traffic it it feels it is too high on one server and another has capacity to take some of it. Now on a normal worldwide office or business this would be excellent as it ensures max availability and uptime with minimal disruption and ensures speedy requests. However when applied to a gaming server it is essentially diverting network traffic around the world to ensure a balanced load across multiple servers. If you’re locked into Central US server in a game, you don’t want your network traffic going to Europe to load balance it, even if it causes a little extra traffic on the US server.

As I said previously this had been available on all US servers prior to July, so you may have seen mild ping spikes if you’re in Central US and your traffic went to East Coast for example, however it wouldn’t have had too much of an issue during your game. However if you’re traffic is crossing an ocean to EU it will certainly cause packet loss and ping spikes.

I theorise that by stealth or by accident that this load balancing has been unknowingly turned on for all worldwide servers so that around mid July all the Halo Infinite servers are now redistributing their network traffic during high load to other locations causing the massive ping spikes and packet loss.

Again I could be completely wrong or have picked up the information incorrectly, but the theory and timeline are sound. I’d just need 343 to confirm that this isn’t the case.

By Total Legends over Halo Waypoint*

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