EVE General Discussion

Is it activity-specific? What are you doing when the socket closes?

It can be at pretty much any point for me. For a while, I was leaning to the common “AFK” explanation since there seemed to be an ever so slightly larger chance of it happening when I was looking away, but then I went AFK for an hour and came back while still being connected…

…and ten minutes later, in the middle of furiously 0.01:ing in Jita, I got dropped. vOv

But it's been in the middle of pretty much all forms of activity and non-activity in my experience.

I dont want to bash you guys i have plenty of petitions and the are all solved even some of them at the same day so i think you trolling to offen or you QQ only. Or the just have so many petitions you need to wait... lets go for the last one.

It's happened to me a few times lately, but since all I do is change outfits and admire my perfect figure in the mirror, it wasn't too much of a bother.

XX

Thing is, there may be nothing that CCP can do about it.

If, somewhere between you and CCP's servers in London, there's a breakdown in routing, you'll get a socket closed. (and all the logs would show, on CCPs side, is that you stopped sending them anything.)

The Internet's a complex thing, that's held together with duck tape and baling wire. Stuff like web access is simple, as it's short term connections. Eve isn't like that.

Maybe it is a problem with Eve. But it's hard to say, one way or other.

the timeout in eve seems quite long, I had a trouble with my internet a few weeks ago where it DCed when the phone range, but sometimes it would Not time out / give a socket closed error. It would be a fingers crossed don't DC!!! and sometimes it wouldn't! Other times it did. The internet was often off for up to 60 seconds.

There has previously been reported issues with different flavours of traffic shaping software used by many providers.

The idea behind such software is to allow providers to get better performance from any given bandwidth by identifying different types of traffic created by their customers and altering the prio or transmission sequnce of the different kinds of traffic.

In the best of worlds such software provides quick response for time critical interactive applications while delaying and/or slowing down bulk transfers. (And in some more evil cases more or less kill certain traffic, like torrents).

The problem (for the customers) is that there's no perfect way to identify all kinds of different traffic which leads to loads of packets getting mangled, delayed or dropped for no obvious reason.

The only thing CCP or any other application provider can do is to try to find out which software (and version) that is used by the providers that cause those issues amd contact the creators and ask them to adjust their (broken) rules.

But since it's often the customers' providers that are running this type of software (and in some cases even a 3:rd party selling access in bulk to smaller/local provders) it's very hard to find out from the server end of things.

It gets worse since many providers doesn't even admit to their own users that they are running any form of shaping software, much less informing anyone of it's brand or version.

What we can do, more than trying to get our local provider to give us the information we want, is the write petition to CCP with as much connection related information as possible (provider information and traceroutes) to give CCP's network dudes a chance to figure out what's going on and who they can contact to sort out the issues.

The reason it often pops up after a patch is that their might be minor changes/upgrades/fixes to Eve's client-server protocol which can cause some of the shaping software to misidentify the stream.

I don't generally have problems with timing out while AFK. I mostly get the random "socket closed" errors during network activity spikes. Loading a grid, changing systems, and especially opening links in the IGB (like a killboard) will cause me to get a Socket Closed error probably 25% of the time. It is horribly gamebreaking, can't even browse Fukung during roams without getting dropped half the time. Having multiple clients open make it far worse, but often only one of the open clients gets dropped while others are fine.

My connection is fine, and this just started with one of the early nferno patches. I have no issues in other games. plenty of bandwidth, and no noticable network lapse when it happens.

Awesome, not 10 minutes after posting this, I'm now getting "socket closed" within a minute of logging in no matter what I'm doing. Hasn't been this bad for weeks for me. After getting closed like 10 times in the last 15 minutes, now I can't even log in. I'm getting "Connection Timeout - The server did not initiate the compatibility-handshake within a reasonable amount of time" on the login screen. I can access anything except EVE with no problem, and I can even ping the server with no problem. WTF?

I'm not having the issue (at the moment), but my CEO did and still is for a few days now.