Macintosh

Well I seem to have finally found a solution to this so posting it up in case it helps anyone else.

I connect to the Internet using a wireless router. It was by default configured to allow it to change wireless channel if it detected congestion or interference. Disabling that feature has resolved the connectivity / timeout problems I was experiencing. So it looking like Eve cannot cope with the brief interruption that happens when the channel change occurs (most other games just seem to suffer from a brief lag spike).

Well I had hoped that was the fix, and had several stable days, but the problem was back with a vengeance this weekend and I have had to resort back to cabled connection. So pretty frustrating all round.

It's pretty frustrating, especially when I get a response to my bug request telling me this is a support issue and I should raise a petition (this after raising a petition and after going through all the various options before being asked to raise a bug request).

To be honest it has got me scratching my head. My background (a long time ago) is in data communications so I keep looking for some sort of logic in this. For example it definitely happens more frequently when on direct wireless connection. Moving to a wireless access point (which ironically means the laptop is on a cable but the data is still going over the wireless network) does dramatically improve the stability although it doesn't eliminate the problem entirely. So the implication there is that this is indeed something to do with data communications between the client and the server.

Could be some unexpected result of the Cider layer sitting between Eve and OS X.

I'm going to see if I can get hold of some network analyser software for the Mac and see if there is anything I can spot.

I installed Wireshark which is a network analyser / packet capture tool and ran it while I logged in over the wireless connection and played the game with my usual three clients. Everything went fine for 72 minutes then according to the log the CCP host (srv200-g.ccp.cc) simply stopped responding. After that the log is full of the three clients desperately spamming TCP retransmissions of their last packets but not getting any response until I finally close the clients (one closed itself).

What I find interesting - although I do not claim to make sense of it - is that there is over a minute between the first client losing connection (TCP packet sent requesting ACK which was never received) and the retransmissions starting. During that time none of the three clients communicate with the server. From what I can see, the second client send a packet 30 seconds later which is not acknowledged and it immediately starts to retry. The third client send a packet and then starts to retry after a further 20 seconds. After 55 seconds of retrying the first client terminates, closing itself down to the logon screen - I then terminate the other 2 clients.

Given that the game is usually very chatty (up to a dozen packets per second from the three clients) I find these sudden silences to be very interesting. Why the long wait for the acknowledgement before beginning to retry? Why is there no traffic from all three clients during this time? I guess I don't know enough about how Eve works to be able to even hypothesise.

I doubt this is going to really help anyone but I will link this post to my bug report in the hope that it will be of some value to CCP.

That makes sense, and that's fine. But it's a bit alarming to lose a connection when you're at 90% shields, quit, relaunch, and warp back in at 70% armor.

I was actively locking targets, and getting shot at, when my client disconnected.