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Help assessing audio and network connection issues (jitter)

  • 8 July 2020
  • 5 replies
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Shadow has been working flawlessly for the last month or so for me. However just a day or two ago the audio started crackling and sounding like static... I reached out to shadow support and they suggested me running a speed test to the datacenter (Chicago) to assess the connection. My results kind of concern and confuse me - can anyone explain to me what might be causing my connection to behave erratically like the speedtest results below show (all taken within minutes of eachother)?

To be clear right now i'm not necessarily trying to solve the audio crackling problem, I'm trying to figure out what is going on with my connection. Shadow suggested that the Jitter is the concern.

Background: I use the Eero mesh router network, hard wired into the gateway router, i've reset the router, I use spectrum internet 200 mbps download, and I'm about 40 miles from the shadow datacenter.

Test 1:

Latency -18, Jitter - 6, MBPS - 100

Test 2:

Latency - 30, Jitter - 50 (spiked to 200), MBPS - 75

Test 3:

Latency - 18, Jitter - 5, MBPS - 60

Test 4:

Latency - 20, Jitter - 40 (spiked to 200), MBPS - 75

Test 5:

Latency - 17, Jitter - 4, MBPS - 50

Thank you!

 

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Best answer by Darasin 9 July 2020, 20:52

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We have loads of users in the midwest / Ohio area using Spectrum to the Chicago data center experiencing routing issues. One of the US mods has reached out to Spectrum and they didnt seem able / willing to fix the issue. He did notice that he was getting much better stats to NY and that using that vs Chi was likely the best route to go.

 

If you are able to test over Ethernet, I would do that to eliminate wifi. If that test shows no improvement, then its likely Spectrum.

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From your Shadow use whatismyip to get your public IP, then use Ping Plotter to see how many hops you are making to the DC. It should also show where your connection goes to hell.

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Thanks for the tips. It looks like my traffic is routing down near San Jose, CA, and back to Chicago. I’ve tested a few different days and different times and it seems to take similar routes each time. Interestingly I factory reset my shadow the other day and the time zone on the computer was set to that time as well (not central time). Do you think things might improve if I had my shadow in a datacenter closer to San Jose (assuming spectrum won’t change things)?

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Another oddity - I think the issue is the Blade (Nvidia Hd Audio Device). 
 

I use shadow to stream VR games to my Oculus Quest using the Virtual Desktop application. I noticed that VD uses its own audio device (not Blade) and the audio was flawless. Switching back to the Blade device introduces stuttering audio/ crackling. 

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From shadow support “Using Shadow with Virtual Desktop uses a different audio encoder/decoder that may be less susceptible than the Shadow apps to connection issues.”

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