World of Wacraft - Nagle's algorithm

[Electronic Punk]

So this tweak seems to work great in Windows XP and Windows Vista so I decided to test it with Windows 7 - and it works.

Basically taken my ping down from 100-250 to around 30, I'll be testing it a little more tonight (a lower ping means more dps right?)

Here is the information:

TcpAckFrequency - NOTE if you are running Windows Vista this setting may not have any effect - a hotfix is needed which i'm tracking down. This works fine under Windows XP

Type "regedit" in windows "run.." dialog to bring up registry menu
Then find:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\

There will be multiple NIC interfaces listed in there, find the one you use to connect to the internet, there will be several interfaces listed (they have long names like {7DBA6DCA-FFE8-4002-A28F-4D2B57AE8383}. Click each one, the right one will have lots of settings in it and you will see your machines IP address listed there somewhere. Right-click in the right hand pane and add a new DWORD value, name it TcpAckFrequency, then right click the entry and click Modify and assign a value of 1.

You can change it back to 2 (default) at a later stage if it affects your other TCP application performance. it tells windows how many TCP packets to wait before sending ACK. if the value is 1, windows will send ACK every time it receives a TCP package.

Once you do this change restart your computer and load World of Warcraft. You should see a nice latency reduction.

Anyone else ever used this tweak? Have you noticed any issues?

 

[LordOfLA]

nagles is TCP Keepalive... sending more acks shouldn't make any difference either. Most MMO's are udp based too which don't even use them 😀

 

[Electronic Punk]

But it actually works!

 

[Bootsy]

It does...