Poor Host For P2P Gaming

[Dplex920]

For background I have an FTTP internet connection from BT/EE in the UK with all that entails and it's been perfectly fine for some time. I upgraded the ISP wireless router to the Asus RT-AX86U Pro in 2023 and again everything was fine until around November/ December 2024.

Seemingly out of nowhere when I host games such as Minecraft, my friends on my worlds will lag really bad to the point it's unplayable for them. They've even told me my voice goes laggy in party chat only when they're on my host. Also encountered an issue with Warframe. When I'm the host, people that matchmake with me can't spawn in. I'm not experiencing any issues on my end at all, it's only the people that join me in a P2P game. Games with dedicated servers seem completely fine.

I really have no idea what's causing this, I've used port forwarding forever, I always have an open NAT, I've tried turning cake QoS off and on, nothing has seemed to work. Anyone with any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

 

[degrub]

Maybe the ISP started throttling or inadvertently created latency ?
Something get updated on your hosting machine recently ?
What are the latency numbers for your friends when they access your hosting ?

 

[ColinTaylor]

There appears to be some major network issues across the UK at the moment which started at about 22:00 yesterday.

EDIT: From what I can see it's only effecting traffic with a destination outside of continental Europe. e.g. US, Canada, Australia, etc. Bandwidth to these destinations is currently less than 5 Mbps.

 

[Dplex920]

Maybe the ISP started throttling or inadvertently created latency ?
Something get updated on your hosting machine recently ?
What are the latency numbers for your friends when they access your hosting ?

Nothing has really changed on my end at all. I'm not completely sure about the other players' latency but from what I can gather it could be packet loss rather than latency spikes. Why I think that is when playing Minecraft, if we stay close and in the same spot for a while it eventually calms down, but separating or moving around a lot will cause the severe lag. On Warframe I actually have a latency cap on my matchmaking so that would also give more credence to it being packet loss.

It's strange that I wouldn't be experiencing any issues though, only others. I've tried disabling cake to see if that was potentially dropping packets but it didn't help. I've also got my MTU correct at 1492.

 

[Digilog]

Nothing has really changed on my end at all. I'm not completely sure about the other players' latency but from what I can gather it could be packet loss rather than latency spikes. Why I think that is when playing Minecraft, if we stay close and in the same spot for a while it eventually calms down, but separating or moving around a lot will cause the severe lag. On Warframe I actually have a latency cap on my matchmaking so that would also give more credence to it being packet loss.

It's strange that I wouldn't be experiencing any issues though, only others. I've tried disabling cake to see if that was potentially dropping packets but it didn't help. I've also got my MTU correct at 1492.

since QOS isn't really needed on broadband connections greater than 512Kb, I would disable adaptive QOS and see if that is your issue, QOS induces latency due to its adaptive buffer.