Wikipedia vs. Mapserver

Accessing Wikipedia invariably causes City of Heroes to lose connection to the mapserver! Has anyone else experienced this? It's irritating when it happens while I'm running with a team, but it's absolutely maddening when I'm inside a mission that I wind up having to start again.

And yes, I know that the response to "it hurts when I do this" is "then don't DO that", but as far as I'm concerned, activity in my web browser should NOT affect the performance of CoH. Finding out why and stopping it, that would be a nice thing. ^.^;

W4E

I've not had that problem either.

However, you are incorrect in thinking that things happening in your browser shouldn't affect the performance of CoH.

Both are using the same network connection. You may be flooding your network connection with something in the browser or some type of malware causing you to lose connection to the mapserver. There are quite a few things that could be going on in your browser that might be causing that behavior.

Are you on a wireless connection by any chance? If there's any interference on the frequency, I could see heavy burst usage resulting in temporarily excessive packet loss.

Not to mention if he's accessing the old wikia site the malware on it could be causing problems - same goes for any other infected site

Are you using the same resolution in CoH as the desk top? It's possible that your graphics drivers are doing something funky when you switch tasks.

I used to have problems task switching away from CoH to other apps when I was using an old CRT. I was running CoH with a different resolution than Windows. When I upgraded to a new monitor the problem went away, even though I still changed resolutions.

I upgraded the graphics card and got a bigger monitor, and now I use the same screen resolution all the time. Performance is a little slower in game, but I never have any problems with task switching or glitchy or slow graphics resolution switching.

Thanks for the responses and questions! I got sidetracked for a few days, so let me cover these...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Codewalker Are you on a wireless connection by any chance? If there's any interference on the frequency, I could see heavy burst usage resulting in temporarily excessive packet loss.

I'm on a wired connection, via ethernet, but even then, the packet loss concept might still be valid.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ironblade Well, I'll often see things I'm doing interfere with CoH. Running a multi-megabyte download in the background will give me serious lag until it's finished. Wikipedia just doesn't take that kind of bandwidth, though.

Yeah, this is true. When running CoH, I try to avoid doing other things that might indude lag, and even avoiding the youtubes. One of my desktop background images is a slideshow that changes every 15 seconds, normally, and THAT will cause a little bit of lag in CoH, so I adjust that when I remember to do so.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ironblade I wonder: 1) What browser are you using and do you have any plug-ins installed? Maybe something in the browser is messing up your connection in general and CoH suffers along with everything else. 2) Can you access other sites while running CoH? Particularly something requiring more bandwidth, like Youtube, for example.

I use Seamonkey (the Netscape legacy and Firefox cousin), and the plug-ins are fairly mundane. I haven't updated the browser for awhile so it might not be playing nice with Wikipedia because of that. In fact, it hasn't displayed images for a few months now so I know it isn't.

Other sites: it used to be that weather.com (the Weather Channel's website) would cause the same problem, but that hasn't been the case for over a year. And while I avoid youtube, I still use it on occasion, and it's not touched CoH that I can recall.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gaia Not to mention if he's accessing the old wikia site the malware on it could be causing problems - same goes for any other infected site

I'm talking about straight up wikipedia.org. I don't recall other wiki type sites having this effect, however.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gaia Also is this a new or existing browser session - starting a new one will put additional demands on system resources which may be sufficient on a low end PC to cause the connection to time out - again without knowing details of his system we don't know whether that is a possibility. If he posts up the output from CoHHelper and HijackThis we can get some idea if there is anything wrong on his system. Without more details than we already have we are all just guessing.

I keep the browser running pretty much constantly -- generally pointing at a page that lives on my PC, which is basically a page full of links. So, it's an existing browser session.

I'm willing to attempt CoHHelper and HijackThis if you think it's important. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rodion Are you using the same resolution in CoH as the desk top? It's possible that your graphics drivers are doing something funky when you switch tasks. I used to have problems task switching away from CoH to other apps when I was using an old CRT. I was running CoH with a different resolution than Windows. When I upgraded to a new monitor the problem went away, even though I still changed resolutions.

I have the same resolution for CoH as I do for the rest of my desktops, but I know what you're saying here -- I've experienced that with other applications before, just not here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gaia If others get the same behaviour when accessing those pages and not others it would point to a problem with the page rather than his PC. If not we can be reasonably confident its something to do with his PC somewhere. Its also possible that some piece of malware may be hijacking his browser.

Well, from what I've read, it would seem that I'm the only one having this problem. The ONLY other thing I can think of is maybe there's a port conflict going on, that my router's virutal server settings could be slightly out of whack, and that wikipedia is trying to use the same ports as CoH.

I have an older desktop that can still handle CoH. I'll fire it up, update things, and see if I can't repeat the problem with it, and report. Otherwise, unless someone else surfaces with the same thing, I won't pester any of you about it again. I'll just accept the situation and try to avoid stepping on the "landmine".

Thanks for the effort, guys, whether I get this fixed or not. I really do appreciate it! :)

W4E

I'd almost point at the "I keep this open continuously" as the possible culprit. I realize they're not the same, but there are times that out of the blue IE will just up and gobble 50% of the resources when I'm not looking (something to do with FB or image/link heavy sites I think actually). With a process like that open for so long I wonder what exactly it's trying to keep ahold of during this period of time. Depending on the version of OS, it's possible that it's even cache-ing that whole session to the point of boiling over. I'm also curious as to what the links are that you're keeping readily available as perhaps there's an off the wall issue here that if anything should be documented.