Question / Help Dropping a lot of frames

[Tidy]

Kharay - I do agree its likely to be twitch... but for me its always worth ruling out possibilities that you have control over.

There are other "local" factors that may affect performance.... network load in the local area?

I think if it was me, if I was absolutely sure its not local... is to try each of the other twitch servers and see if i get the same dropped frames?

 

[alpinlol]

try whatever you want ;D fact is that twitch is acting real weird lately and if you want to keep streaming with recordings i can suggest moving to hashd.tv as long as twitch is trying to fix their stuff

 

[Kharay]

Kharay - I do agree its likely to be twitch... but for me its always worth ruling out possibilities that you have control over.

1 -- I do nothing but sit here all day long answering questions, helping people set up their stream and such. I've seen this issue pass by more than a naturally random number of times these past few days.
2 -- If I am not sitting here answering questions and helping people set up their streams, I typically am just toying around with OBS. So, I ran into this very same issue as early as 2 - 3 weeks ago already. That is round and about the time I started noticing the first real major issues during certain hours.

It keeps coming back to Occam's Razor (wooohooo)... amongst all hypotheses, the one that makes the least number of assumptions is the safest hypothesis to select.

 

[Grumbul]

I absolutely agree with Kharay here.

I recently upgraded to Virgin Media's top tier package and have excellent upload speeds and am in absolutely no danger of hitting Virgin's traffic management threshold.

Twitch has been acting VERY erratically for several weeks now. Regular server disconnects, horrendous chat issues and some very inconsistent connections to the European servers.

In the past 48 hours I have used UK Primary, UK Secondary, Amsterdam and German servers as the jitter across these is wildy variable at different times of the day.

There is in my opinion something very wrong with the way Twitch is running things at the moment and as always the biggest problem is the complete lack of information from them.

 

[Tidy]

Hey Grumbul,

If you are using VMs superhub and getting really high jitter, turn the hub off for 30 seconds and turn it back on... fixes it everytime ;)

 

[Pugget]

I assume that almost all the users that posted here were streaming to LHR or AMS? If not, please do respond, as then this is a wider issue then I suspect.

Otherwise, I believe this to be related to a configuration error by someone who wasn't fully thinking about what they were doing. It was found late today and should be fixed up by mid-day California time tomorrow. Sorry for the issues. Our Twitter support had not informed backend of reported issues, and as such was not informed himself as to what was going on behind the scenes. I apologize for the bad tweets.

That said, for some of you, it actually /is/ your ISP some of the time. :-) For example, Virgin rate limits based on amount of data uploaded, not speed at which it is uploaded. You can see the details here:

http://my.virginmedia.com/traffic-manag ... holds.html

1.4 GB in an hour gets you a cap at 2.5 Mbps for the next hour, which realistically translates to being able to broadcast at 1.5-2 Mbps (XXL100 plan); violate the next cap, get throttled to 1.8 Mbps. All their plans, except the two most expensive, immediately cap to speeds under which it would be hard to broadcast 720p. They are essentially advertising burst speeds, not a pipe you can use however you want. To Virgin's credit, they are relatively open with their traffic shaping policies - most ISPs avoid discussing them, or act like they don't exist. Such policies almost always kick in during evening hours.

 

[solomonyo]

Well, no offense to anyone of you now but if a person comes and ask for help on your twitter perhaps the support should listen and actually take a look into the matter instead of saying "IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT, BLAME YOUR ISP!!!!1111".

Btw, I have no clue what LHR / AMS is.

 

[Kharay]

LHR/AMS are specific Twitch.TV servers.

http://twitchstatus.com/

 

[solomonyo]

Right, yeah.
AMS on my part.

 

[Pugget]

LHR = London; AMS = Amsterdam.

As for our Twitter, engineering largely leaves that to the customer support team, who is flooded with far more work than they can handle, most of it non-technical; it's far from ideal. Sorry if it wasted your time - I can certainly understand being a little peeved with those tweets. Engineering is discussing ways to try and get better information out, but they all seem to involve us writing English rather than code, an idea which has yet to win over all the hearts and minds.

 

[Grumbul]

Hi Pugget,

I for one really appreciate the response here - thank you very much.

Just to get the ISP issue out of the way - I am on Virgin Media's XXL120 package which means my first hourly threshold is set at 2200MB.

I broadcast at a 2500 kbps which means an hourly CBR stream would typically allocate around 1100MB to my threshold total.

As you can probably ascertain from that I am in no danger whatsoever of being throttled. In fact, even if I were throttled and did so for the extended 2 hour limit my upload speed would still be at 4.3Mbps - still more than enough to maintain my 2500 kbps stream.

Now, back to the case in point.

I have in fact been having problems with LHR (primary and secondary) and AMS so yes - maybe that is the problem and it iis absolutely awesome to have this confirmed by yourself.

It was relatively obvious from day one that this was a Twitch issue as Kharay mentioned - it was a little disappointing that there had been no acknowledgement of this from anyone at Twitch. Out of interest you mention something about Tweets - which Twitch Twitter account is best to contact for reports such as this and/or updates on technical issues?

Finally, any idea on where we can get an update on when this has been confirmed as resolved?

 

[Kharay]

@Pugget: You guys need a support guru. ;) *shameless job application*

Anyhow, one interesting approach would be to have an experience day. What I mean is, have a support employee take a look in engineering's kitchen for a day and vice versa. Mostly to get an understanding and appreciation of the unique challenges to either.

And from that point on just make sure there is a very direct (and a very constant/consistent) line of communication between engineering and support. There is no need to expose the engineering staff to the global community, just their expertise/information.

 

[Pugget]

I used Virgin as an example because they make their policies so clear. No direct explanation of your issues was intended. :-) Most people don't have high-end plans, and many smaller broadcasters like to ramp up the bitrates - I came across someone trying to stream 30 Mbps last week - yet people can be very dismissive of caps. Certainly not the problem in this case.

There is no technical Twitter account currently. I'm afraid you are stuck with @TwitchtvSupport for technical interfacing, or using help.twitch.tv. The second option may be the better of the two, but pinging both is recommended. If you are a partner, and you have these sorts of issues, please, please, ping your contact in the partner support staff (Gunrun, Trance, Oppie, etc). Honestly, that's how we get our best feedback most of the time, as it bypasses the normal interfaces setup to keep users away from engineers (which are 100% necessary, sorry, else we'd never get work done).

I do troll (ahem, read) these boards from time to time, but it's pretty rare these days, usually during bouts of insomnia like tonight. Please assume this issue resolved unless it persists, in which case please drop a line on this thread. Actually, either way, please post back with your experiences during peak hours tonight (4-10pm CEST).

 

[Pugget]

Anyhow, one interesting approach would be to have an experience day. What I mean is, have a support employee take a look in engineering's kitchen for a day and vice versa. Mostly to get an understanding and appreciation of the unique challenges to either.

This is an interesting idea, but I'm not entirely sure it would work in both directions. At least on the CDN side of things, we don't end up fighting too many fires. Instead, we stare intently into our screens, music pumping in headphones, and type (questionably) logical statements in code all day. I think it would likely be far more illuminating for us to see what they have to deal with. That said, I'll float the idea around the office. It's quite clear there is a strong desire for more technical communication, and maybe this could help us get there.

 

[Tidy]

Hi Pugget,

Thanks for responding on this thread :)

If it was a config error your end, why did it only affect a certain amount of users and not everybody?

 

[Pugget]

This would have only affected users during certain times of day (peak hours) streaming to AMS/LHR, and even then, it would be worse at higher bitrates. Some users might not have noticed at all. These things rarely manifest in a boolean manner, which can make finding them hard.

 

[Tidy]

oh i see :)

I stream to the secondary twitch server in london and never noticed anything personally. Would it be fair to say, that if users experience similar problems - to change to a different server for testing?

 

[Kharay]

Changing servers is always a safe first thing to try. If it doesn't work, well, it won't hurt anything either.

 

[nrw2000]

Please assume this issue resolved unless it persists, in which case please drop a line on this thread. Actually, either way, please post back with your experiences during peak hours tonight (4-10pm CEST).

I streamed at this Wednesday 18:30-22:00 to Amsterdam server from Moscow. My connection is good: 60Mb upload/download. Upload was fine for any bitrate till 3000 (i didn't try to stream on bitrate higher then 3000). Dashboard showed excellent indicator. But download... It's impossible to view my stream using bitrate more then 1500 (same situation for any another stream). Video stutter each 10 second, but audio is fine. I found that IP ranges for twitch download servers in US, not in Europe and think this is a reason why streams lag.
I didn't try to stream to US servers, maybe it will be better choise in this case?

For test I streamed in parallell to hashd.tv with bitrate 3000 - no any lag for viewers.

 

[Helixia]

I'm happy i'm not the only one from Europe who has issues with the Twitch servers.
I read the whole thread and to be sure i tested my connection again.
My connection was good with no traffic shapers.

I hope Twitch will fix their problems quickly.