so obviously the live stream dropping has not made anyone happy. i know it frustrates the live listeners and it certainly doesn't make me happy as one of the producers/hosts. i know you guys don't blame us for it, but it's really frustrating because it's *our* show at the end of the day, and watching you guys do your counts and so forth in chat is really frustrating for me because i want it to be a perfect experience so you can turn us on, have chat up and alt-tab to some computer games if you want. the stream dropping is effecting our live listener numbers, which is especially alarming.

ANYWAY, this isn't a pity party-- what i wanted to let you all know is that we did do some upgrades/changes in studio. before, we had 2 routers in the house, one in our office (the main one) and one in the living room that OLR was plugged into (same one as all my video game consoles) that went to the main router. we bought a new router for the office and now the "old" main router is in the living room but as a bridge, no longer two separate networks. we also found an uber-long cat 5 so we can plug the OLR computer directly into the main router (so the bridge won't really matter anyway, it's only for my consoles). even if this doesn't fix it, my old router didn't have N wireless so it was worth it to upgrade it anyway.

again, this might not fix the problem. if it doesn't, bobby and i may have to explore what we can do with our streaming provider up to the point of possibly switching if we must. the whole problem is tough to diagnose though. VOG has been up since april-ish and this only seems to be a problem in the past 6 weeks. i believe the provider we are using is the same one that allgames used for a time in the beginning when we were first on that network live.

okay just wanted to let you guys know we're not ignoring it and doing what we can!

_________________

Just ran a ping test to our server for 90 minutes or so... looking pretty good *fingers crossed*

Packets: Sent = 6168, Received = 6168, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 85ms, Maximum = 171ms, Average = 88ms

_________________

Could this have anything to do with whatever happened with their server following the power outage from Hurrican Sandy?

_________________

Great thought, but these issues were showing up a couple weeks before all that started Perhaps the weather change or a storm not as notable as sandy but... tough to diagnose from my end.

_________________

We also have already been moved to another datacenter since the problem started - the one we were using before Sandy was knocked out, and they relocated us to another server farm in another physical location.

The issue also apparently manifested itself on my stream for the first time this past Sunday. You can actually hear it during the OLR call - when their audio quality gets REALLY bad, that's when the stream drops for the live listeners.

What's essentially happening is that we're getting certain bouts of latency that is stopping our packets from getting through. There is a very low threshhold before a ping timeout occurs on a live stream - much lower than on IRC or even Skype. Skype compensates by lowering the audio quality, but since we stream at a constant 96k/44 stereo to the stream, ANY dip in bandwidth for even a second causes issues. (If you hear the audio skipping on the live stream, that's the same issue.)

The router changes will most likely help - eliminating a step in the process between the show computer and the modem is good. I'm thinking what happened to me is that one of my other devices (TiVo, maybe even the Wii U) woke up out of sleep mode and did a big download, and my router is old and decided to dedicate the bandwidth to that device rather than my upstream. If it happens again this Sunday, I'll have to make some changes as well.

This is, sadly, not a problem with our provider at all, but it's on our end. They're just minor hiccups, but with something like streaming, even a minor hiccup causes major problems.

_________________
Bobby Blackwolf
Co-Founder, Editor in Chief: Technical
Host - The Bobby Blackwolf Show
LIVE Sundays 8PM ET/5PM PT

It looks like piggy-backing 1 NAT subnet off of another was the problem (a crossover cable running from the main router to the WLAN input port of another, which was doing its own DHCP), which admittedly was a terrible setup from the get-go but I was lazy and it never occurred to me that hey, maybe my shitty little $45 Netgear from 3-4 years ago could probably be set up as a bridge too and this would've never happened. It was also hard to troubleshoot since the stream was the only thing messing up (XBLA, Skype, IRC never dropped out on this setup but as Bobby said Shoutcast is particularly fussy and high maintenance).

We now have a Linksys E2500 as the mothership and the old Linksys WRT54G running purely in bridged mode; everything seems to be great. The show computer ran off the bridge tonight, but we did have a long cable prepared to run it directly to the main router during break if needed. It also gave us an excuse to update the firmware on the WRT54G to something a view versions newer than what we had, even if it was still from 2009. The E2500 is also dual-band broadcast and .n WiFi protocol so we needed that anyway.

There are still other upgrades we can do, like switching to Gigabit NICs in all our machines and using Gigabit cabling but we can earmark those for next year and after we move.

-----

We also ran this last night:
Ping using 256 byte packets - 6pm to 9:45pm
Ping statistics for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Packets: Sent = 12930, Received = 12918, Lost = 12 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 86ms, Maximum = 188ms, Average = 91ms