IRC disconnected

[John Carlyle-Clarke]

Alejandro wrote:
> Hola!!
>
> I have a problem when using IRC clients: I *always* get a *huge* lag
> (most of the times I just get disconnected). I really don't know why.
> Surfing and downloading is alright! (~400 KBps) but IRC's clients (I've
> tried bitchx and Xchat) refuse to work properly. 
>
> I forwarded the port 6667 to my ip address but that didn't work.
>
> Any ideas will be welcomed ;)
> Saludos
>
>
>   
Hola Alejandro-

Could it be traffic shaping by your ISP?  Many ISP's do this now to try 
and control traffic levels and also to provide differentiated service 
options (i.e. buy this more expensive package and get full-speed P2P).

Mostly this is not noticeable unless you do a lot of P2P or play online 
games, but I found a strange problem where connecting to a MUD (text 
based online game in case you are too young to remember them ;) ) was 
giving me random lag of between 1 and 5 seconds.  I investigated all 
sorts of local causes but it turned out to be an effect of their traffic 
shaping.  I think their system recognises traffic by port numbers and 
also signature content.  They prioritise everything they know about like 
pop3, imap, smtp, http, https, ssh, irc,  etc. and everything else goes 
slow.  Because this was not a recognised application, it was going into 
the slow lane.

Unfortunately they told me they couldn't do anything about it.  I got 
around it by using ssh to a shell account I still have somewhere 
(remember them?) and then use my MUD client from there.

It may be worth trying another OS or computer on your connection to see 
if it shows the same problem.  If so, it may be your ISP.

Mucha suerte!

John