Question about TTL & dropped packets/gaming

[Maverick2002]

I've been some issues with Time Warner regarding packet loss which would disconnect me on a regular basis while gaming. Apparently it was an issue with the lines outside my home, which has been looked at and fixed. I got a new modem as well, and the tech had me set the TTL setting to 17200 from 3600 (I think).

One thing I've noticed (besides lower pings and less timeouts) is that a) I no longer get booted when I do encounter 2-3 consecutive timeouts and 2) I occasionally see really high pings - around 2000-3000ms - but it doesn't affect the gaming.

For all intents and purposes I can play fine now (fingers crossed).

My question is what exactly does the TTL router setting affect?

TIA

 

[imagoon]

They must be talking about something different as setting TTL (time to live) higher than 63 or 64 (and having it work above that) is pretty rarely needed. TTL is an anti looping packet mechanism. Every packet gets a TTL value and every time it is routed, the TTL is reduced by 1. When the TTL is 1 and the router gets it, it will be discarded. I think the highest route count I have seen is 43 between the US and village in China. You can set it up to 255 but it is rarely needed and only needed in special cases such as a high count mesh wireless network that is using a routed backend which you won't see in most cases anyway.

 

[SecurityTheatre]

I've been some issues with Time Warner regarding packet loss which would disconnect me on a regular basis while gaming. Apparently it was an issue with the lines outside my home, which has been looked at and fixed. I got a new modem as well, and the tech had me set the TTL setting to 17200 from 3600 (I think).

One thing I've noticed (besides lower pings and less timeouts) is that a) I no longer get booted when I do encounter 2-3 consecutive timeouts and 2) I occasionally see really high pings - around 2000-3000ms - but it doesn't affect the gaming.

For all intents and purposes I can play fine now (fingers crossed).

My question is what exactly does the TTL router setting affect?

TIA

As was said, TTL is a "time to live" and should be set to 64. There is no reason and no performance benefit to changing it.

You may have changed your MTU (maximum transmission unit), which affects packet sizes, but neither numbers of 17200 and 3600 make sense in that area. A normal MTU setting on Ethernet networks is in the range of 1400-1460 to account for Ethernet's maximum frame size.