I'll preface this with saying, I'm only moderately computer-savvy and I did a lot of googling about this issue over the course of months, and none of the solutions I found have worked. The problem: I have a custom PC built by a friend. I can figure out the specs if necessary, but most of the parts are less than 2 years old and it runs Windows 7 64-bit. From the time I started using it, which I believe was around January 2016, I get periodically disconnected from the MMO I play. (Final Fantasy 14) Some stuff: -This happens more or less every hour, dependent on the time i start up the computer. It happens regardless of whether I'm starting it up cold or waking it up from sleep mode. If I start up at 10pm, I will disconnect at 11pm, then 12am, then 1am, and so on. Sometimes the time varies by 1-4 minutes but not really any more than that. -it's a very brief disconnect. I can often log back on before the game even realizes I've been kicked, which is a pain in the butt because it'll give me an error message until my character is finally booted from the servers. Only then will it let me log back in. -the game isn't crashing, it just sends me back to the login screen. -nothing else seems to be affected. I'm frequently on Skype/Discord and experience no connection issues at the time. Browser internet works too. Have not tested other MMOs. Does not seem to affect multiplayer Minecraft. -the error code the game gives me is 90006/90007 (alternates between the two). Before the beginning of June, when there was a large patch, the error code was 90002. The official forums have no real details about this problem, other than 9000* errors are "client-side". -FF14 is apparently notorious for exposing tiny problems with people's internet connections that don't usually affect other programs. A lot of other players have a similar issue, but their disconnects are random, or way more frequent. Solutions I have tried: Port forwarding. postponed DC for 2 hours and then things went back to business as usual (once every hour). I returned the settings I'd changed to normal after I was informed doing this is a security risk anyway. Static IP address. Have had a dynamic one. setting IP address to static postponed DC for two hours and then it went back to happening every hour again. Flushing DNS: apparently did nothing. Checking for Malware: both Malwarebytes and the regular windows antivirus found nothing. Posting this here on the off chance someone has some idea of what this might be, since I'm at my wit's end. It really interferes with my ability to play because if I don't arrange my plans around it, I can disconnect in the middle of raids and dungeons and screw my entire party over. (I main a tank.)
Other things I remember I have tried: Tested to see if it was my firewall. It happened even with the firewall off. -updated my network controller drivers. I have a wired connection but my computer also has a wireless receiver install that I keep turned off. The issue happened on both wireless and wired connections.
I have a feeling something, perhaps your router's NAT (network address translation) is timing out connections after an hour regardless of activity. I'd say it's more likely to be an intermediate device than your computer.
Necroing this to say that over a year later I may have finally found the solution. Thought maybe it was a DCHP thing/my IP lease not renewing properly. Eliminated that but spent some time taking notes on how often it happened and i noticed that my computer clock would jump forward a few minutes every hour. Turns out it's losing time and then syncing with the internet server and when it does...bam, disconnected from game. Turns out other people have this problem: if the game server clock and your computer clock are mismatched, you get booted. I tested it by force syncing the clock when i noticed the time was different from the in-game time, and it booted me each time immediately. It's been a problem since the computer was built so it was probably a bad battery in the motherboard all along. Going to get a new one tomorrow and we'll find out.
And...it turns out it wasn't the battery. Replacing it made no change at all. Was annoyed but not too upset because I had to eliminate the possibility. I called in the cavalry finally, my friend had me check some things and it turns out the clock doesn't slow if the computer isn't running anything, so just...the programs I usually use are taking up enough processing speed to mess with it. (Game, internet, aim, discord.) She found a workaround where I can set the clock to sync every ten minutes instead of every hour. It worked so far, 6 hours and no disconnect, time only varying by a minute at the most. It would be nice to solve the issue at the source, but it may just be Windows 7 being crappy ultimately. If it works, it works.
...system clock is supposed to have high enough priority that that shouldn't be happening unless everything including the OS is freezing entirely and frequently? ETA: so then the question becomes either 'why is the computer freezing so often' or 'what has higher priority than the system clock?'
The computer doesn't freeze that often if at all, so I really don't know. I've been monitoring it and it still happens even with the clock being synced every ten minutes, which means it still falls out of sync that quickly. It definitely seems to correlate with higher memory/cpu usage and my friend is a bit stumped. I'm just keeping an eye on it and collecting data atm. Even just running the game and a messenger program and that's it, it will sometimes mess up, tho less frequently the fewer things are running. I think Chrome, which is the browser I use, eats a lot of memory thru tab generation so sometimes closing it helps, but other than that I have no clue what to do at this pt. I guess to summarize: -the clock being off is what's causing the game to disconnect. Specifically, at the moment the clock corrects itself to the right time, the game disconnects. -we don't know what's causing the clock to drift (it's always slow, between 1-4 mins, and gets worse over time, tho the rate varies) other than it seems to correlate with high cpu usage? -I have 8G ram, and even running all my programs at once (ffxiv, pidgin [chat client], chrome, discord, various art programs) doesn't exceed 3.5G -the only time I can remember my computer freezing recently is when I opened like 50 1000×1600px screenshots in an art program by accident, and it unfroze itself and terminated the program before too long -have run virus and malware scans recently and they came up negative -this has been happening since the computer was built a little over a year ago, p consistently. So right after OS install. -background programs I can think of that run all the time: f.lux, and my Wacom driver, CCleaner -googling only seems to bring up replacing the motherboard battery (done) or forcing a more frequent sync as I did. I think because so few people have the combo of this problem + FFXIV, which seems to be the only frigging MMO that is this sensitive connection wise, lol
I think there's ways to change a program's priority-so you could just up the system clock's priority to see if that helps?
After a bit of poking: apparently the system clock isn't it's own process but it's bundled into explorer. And also the problem I'm having is a known Windows issue that's been frustrating people for a while, and is in fact caused by too much CPU usage. I can try boosting explorer's priority above the game and see if that helps.
... man that is so weird. you'd think if anyone was having clock killing issues from Too Much Stuff it'd be me, but... how's it holding up now?
