Accelerate your online games

How can I accelerate my online games?

Traffic Shaping technology does keep ping times low and transfer rates consistently high at the same time.

Still, to achieve optimal ping times, you should prioritize your game(s) as high as possible. You will find that we have already listed some of the currently most popular games under Program Settings. Should your game not be among the ones listed there, you can simply add it to the list.

A special case is the HTTP stream detection. If the detected protocol is HTTP, cFosSpeed tries to detect, if it is a video or audio stream. This works as follows:

If the user agent is one of the well-known players or has the substring “player” in it, cFosSpeed categorizes the connection as HTTP_STREAM_C or HTTP_STREAM_S. Otherwise if the content-type is audio or video it categorizes the connection as BSTREAM_C or BSTREAM_S. The BSTREAM_C/S connections are prioritized as “normal” so that the actual priority is determined by the program prioritization.

This allows you, for example in uncertain cases, to prioritize it according to your program use.

You can also let us know what online games you would like to have included on that list for future updates as well. Please be careful to prioritize as few data and programs as possible in such a manner. This is because if you were to assign high priority to everything, you would be no better off than having nothing prioritized at all. Alternatively, should the program name itself not be clear, you can also prioritize the ports used by the online game. If the TCP/UDP destination ports of an application are known, you can prioritize their data transfer as follows (by editing the [filter] section of the settings.ini file):

For TCP ports:
[filters]
; dest port=1234
filter=-tcp-dport 1234 -c high

For UDP ports:
[filters]
; dest port=1234
filter=-udp-dport 1234 -c high

After making those changes and saving them, the new settings still need to be loaded. This is done by opening the console (under Start, Program, cFosSpeed) and entering “spd reload”. Your changes will take (and remain in) effect after the next time you restart your system. >cFosSpeed-Filter Manual (English)

Optimizing Connection Settings:

You can specify exactly what transfer medium you use under Connection Settings. The more information about a connection is available to cFos or cFosSpeed, the better ping times will be. Default is “Adaptive”. But if you were for instance using a DSL connection, you should select the appropriate DSL standard or protocol as your medium.

Favor Ping:

In addition, you can also use the settings in the context menu or status window to activate “Favor Ping”. A green arrow will then show up on the status window. This setting will have cFos or cFosSpeed do everything to keep ping times to a minimum but at the expense of transfer speed, which may slow down considerably.

Playing While Downloading:

If you are playing a game online without Traffic Shaping and run an upload or download at the same time, ping times to your gameserver will rise. Less data traffic means better (i.e., lower) ping. Especially with filesharing programs and other applications that send out lots of data, ping times often skyrocket resulting in serious lag. This will also slow down your in-game reaction time horrendously.

Traffic Shaping alleviates this problem by allowing filesharing and downloads to run in the background while gaming. This may still raise ping times minimally though. Therefore, we recommend you to keep “Favor Ping” activated at such times. By default, filesharing programs are set to very low priority. Now, this should not be taken to mean they are artificially slowed or even altogether stalled. What it does mean, however, is that such data will be briefly delayed when more important data like online game traffic needs to be transmitted. Only this priority scheme makes it possible to have filesharing programs run at maximum transfer rates while still using the same connection for other applications at the same time.