I am using TCP sockets and having an odd issue. Users who connect to my server through LAN lines and even LAN routers run just fine. However, users who connect to the internet through a wireless router drop connection to the server after a while. Any ideas what would be causing this to occur and how I might go about fixing it? Thanks!

You're going to have to gather a little more data than that.

Is it all users with a wireless router?

Does it happen when users connect over the internet, not using wireless?

Does it happen when users connect using a wireless router connected to the LAN?

Does it happen to all users using a wireless router connecting over the internet, or only some users? Only one specific user? Only one router brand?

Unfortunately, beyond what I've already said, I don't have a whole bunch of data. I can gather it from questions you ask... and I will try to accommodate you as much as I can. Frankly, I have no idea what is causing it so I don't even know where to look.

I would say yes to the all wireless router users. However, our test user base is still a little small so that may not cover a wide range of wireless routers.

For the current application, users are only connecting to the server over the internet. As far as I can tell, all users that connect to the internet using a wireless router have this issue while all users that connect to the internet directly or through a LAN router do not.

If I had some ideas of where to look or what to look for, I could focus the testing efforts.

Thanks for your response. I am anxious to get this resolved.

-E

It's unlikely that all users using wireless routers would have a problem, but other users would not. On your end, you can't tell the difference. There might be something else -- session time-outs, NAT compatibility, etc -- that gets in the way.

Also, check whether the users can keep another TCP connection up while your connection goes down. If not, it may be that the wireless router resets itself every so often (I've seen many cheap home routers do this :-( )

I found that while playing WoW, I would get ping spikes of 1-2 seconds about twice a minuted at regular intervals. A little research found that it was actually being caused by a suspected bug in the Wireless Zero Config Service.

Get your testers to run "net stop wzcsvc" after they have connected to their wireless connection. If this fixes the problems, I would imagine that you will need to change your server to recover from loss and ping spikes.