12-08-2002 02:59									#1
	IRC-Turnchat tip Enter the AD-FREE zone

The purpose of this thread is to help people understand how IRC works, incase we have another turnthread, and wish it to be uninterrupted.

Any given large scale IRC group is made up of servers. These servers have lines of communication between then which take MASSIVE bandwidth, completely text. These lines (for this purpose) are one way data dumps where the server pukes out everything it knows, and tries to eat the incoming data as fast as it can. There is no centralization. Due to the servers need to keep up, the lag between them can become horrible, while at any given time your lag with the server may never hit even a half a second.

PICTURE
In the picture is an example of a turnchat (or any IRC event). Lets say you connect to server 1 (twisted?) and glorious leader is on server 2 (arcor?). Perhaps there is a dataline from your server to his, however no direct line back. Instead when presidente speaks, it must go through Server 4. If that outgoing line breaks, then we've got a split and Server 2 flys off the map. Now suppose the direct line between Server 1 and 2 is severed. There is still a line from one to the other, but there is a problem: it goes between many other servers. Not only that, but between Server 4 and 3 and the moment, there is a reroute through Zimbabwe for some unknown reason. That means a person on Server 1 saying something gets the lag of Server 1, Server 4, Zimbabwe, Server 3, and Server 2, while the person on Server 2 only has the lag of that server, Server 4, and Server 1. Result: Messages go fast one way, and slow another. This happened to us lately.

Resolution
Simply enough, everyone join the same IRC server. It's not difficult for a quick check to see which are the best ones any given afternoon (changes daily). Then it could be announced in a number of ways, or, people could simply whois the president, and join that server.

mIRC Instructions
Log on to any IRC server in our group (dalnet) and type
/whois [insert glorious leader's name here]
then type
/server [insert server name that appeared here]
then join the civ3dem chat once you are connected. Most of the lag you see will be your own fault, and is rarely above 3 seconds. If it is above 3 seconds, then the best server for the time was not picked.


Example
/whois Brant

>Brant is unread@wnpgmb11dc1-res-85-68.mts.net * >Brant
>Brant on @#Moogles +#gamemp3s @#zombocom
>Brant using omen.se.eu.dal.net [194.47.161.38] Omen.
>Brant has identified for this nick
>Brant is away: -( eva episodes 13 to whenever-i-get->bored )- since 02:48p -( P:On / L:On )-
>Brant End of /WHOIS list.

/server omen.se.eu.dal.net
* Connecting to omen.se.eu.dal.net (7000)

TADA same server.

Now if for some very odd reason you cannot also connect to the same server that your peer is (e.g. you're lying, you're using a typewriter, etc), then you need to play around with a few servers and see which gives the lowest ping.

Alternatively, someone could simply host a server of their own.

Attachment: servers.jpg
This has been downloaded 55 time(s).

	12-08-2002 03:25									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

Another solution is to use a smaller IRC network. A network who has 2 servers can not redirect through 4 servers, and it certainly has less people connected, so it uses less bandwith, so there is no lag. (And DALnet refuses 9/10 of my connections...)