The Reasons Why COD 4 lags
posted by oktober on 2/19/08 at 7:00am
A lot of you are wondering why is this game full of lag or latency, the problem is P2P gaming doesn't work for large hardcore applications. P2P is a cost effective way to avoid using dedicated servers and instead treat the players as the servers. P2P might work but IW can not regulate/ optimize everybody's router and internet connections and so it does not work because of poor quality connections.
The kicker being that if everyone is running great and one guy comes in with a crap connection the game is only as strong as it weakest connection (IE you join a game from L.A. and get put in a match in FRANCE tho you may have a great internet in the US your signal will be so weak by the time it reaches France that you create lag for everyone in the game and not intentionally, (worst part is you do not know its you making the game lag for everyone else).)
The next gem in the IW crown is producing game that requires a signal stronger than DSL. that right DSL is not good enough for this game, unless the letters I received from two different tech support guys saying so are wrong. I went to Activision to complain about the lag since IW was not doing anything in hopes of getting an answer or a solution and they gave me answers.
Activision responses to Lag and P2P gaming
Response 01
Hello and thank you for contacting Activision Customer Support,
Please note that the matchmaking service that the game uses does make it so that if there are users that are laggy, they will affect the other users in the game. The matchmaking mode of online gameplay was the way that the developers intended for the game to be played. There was a great surge in the amount of players since the Christmas Season so you may be playing with players that have less than optimal connections for the online portion of the game.
Response 02
Thank you for contacting Activision’s Technical Support. I'm sorry to hear about your problem. This game uses peer to peer connections, meaning that if you are playing in a match with a persion with a very slow connection, it doesn't matter how fast yours is, because the other player cannot send/receive information as fast as you can. Your upload is limited to 480 kilobits, which is equivalent to 60 kilobytes. That is actually very high for upload, however most DSL users are limited to 128 kilobits which is 16 kilobytes. Sixteen kb is not sufficient to support large games and leads to many problems. This is what creates most of the lag in games.
Many users are using routers which are poorly configured or people do not realize that other people are using their connection too at the same time. If you are trying to play when someone in your household starts uploading files or pictures to a website, it will severely impact your gameplay.
On top of that, many ISPs implement port throttling or packetshaping during "peak hours" which further hinder the game and people's connections.
The developers are working on improving the game as seen on the PS3 portion of the developer forums. However, there are a lot of issues like those addressed above that are out of the hands of the devs and reliant on the user and their ISP.
I have since done a little research and there are papers all over talking about how this "COULD" be great technology once the web is ready for it but is not because of distance restrictions. realistically this game should be broken down into small regions and you only play people in those regions like eastern US or western US (maybe even smaller) but IW did not do a good job beta testing so we instead get huge amounts of lag or latency. Below are some rundowns on Netcode from DemonWare.
DemonWare Rundowns of Netcode
Client/Server Games (What we should have)
In a client/server game, network traffic about game state (e.g., the positions of players in the game world) flows according to a radial-topology (see right). All the players send information to the server about what they are doing, and the server sends information back down to all clients about each other. The server is the final authority about what happens in the game. It is common to make it possible for a player's computer to also act as the server whilst he/she is playing the game. This avoids the need for having a lot of dedicated computer resources in a server farm.
Draw Backs
Each game needs a server
Difficult to continue game if server crashes or disconnects
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Games
In a peer-to-peer game, game traffic flows directly from each connected computer to every other connected computer (see left). Each player sends information to every other player about what he/she is doing, and steps are taken to ensure that every player uses this information in exactly the same way to produce exactly the same results. It is necessary that every peer agree exactly about what happens in the game because there is no authority to perform corrections.
Draw Backs
Responsiveness determined by slowest peer (good for RTS and games where latency can be disguised)
Does not scale well (< 16 players on DSL)
had to end it straight away as I had no chance of playing with all the noise 
